#rambling mostly

[synchodai]

The "you are no true Sharran" line from Aylin reveals such a black and white approach to this world's cosmology. I expect it from Aylin, sure, but it's so clear we're supposed to take it as fact because Shadowheart or the narrative never question it.

It basically states that Shadowheart was only able to save Aylin because Shart was born a Selûnite and thus born "good." It has nothing to do with the influence of others, the lessons she learned during the adventure, or exercising her agency. It's all about her "true" self surfacing during that pivotal moment.

But saying Shart was "no true Sharran" is just... objectively wrong? She was raised in the cloister, she practiced their teachings, she participated in missions, she spread the gospel. You can say Shart is a bad Sharran, but to say that she was never a Sharran at all? Shart was in that cloister for 40 years — much longer than she's ever been a Selûnite as a child. This is like telling a Catholic nun that they're no true Christian because they were born to devoutly Jewish parents.

It makes faith a matter of heritage and bloodline. And sure, I'm not denying that is a factor (a huge factor sometimes) but it's so reductive for an otherwise morally-nuanced game to portray religion/faith as an intrinsic quality instead of an active choice you have to make every day.

[lightweaver-naeuri]

Kaladin's take in TWoK flashbacks of bare skin/women in nothing but undergarments not doing anything for him is actually really insightful. Not because he's a kid, but because for many, many people in healthcare the human form is something that becomes inherently (or intentionally) unsexy.

Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a side effect of the field for a lot of providers, and even longtime patients.

Genitals can become unsexy to someone who has been urinated on by an incontinent patient who they're trying to cath. Kissing can be intimidating after you treat a patient whose mononucleosis from half a decade ago left EBV in their system and led to a series of complications and eventually a ruptured spleen.

It's natural to become anxious around the human condition when you're exposed to its negative physiological extremes. Not that I need to wrap this back to Stormlight, but for people to whom physical intimacy is important, I think therapy can be life altering in the best of ways. That's why I'm glad Kaladin is being that change for Roshar.

PTSD is caused by so many things other than war, so idk. It feels good as a lifelong-patient turned healthcare worker to reread a decade old book and see acknowledgement of that trauma being present in Kal before he was even a soldier.

[ithinkthingsaboutstuff]

I have been slowly losing my mind over the mains 6's timeline. I know in the grander narrative it means pretty little but I just need to share my thoughts.

We know that the show takes place in 2017

we also know the ages of the gang (minus Cain)

Jax- 22

Zooble- 22

Pomni- 25

Gangle- 26

Ragatha- 30

Kinger- 48

I am trying to order who got there when (roughly) again I know this is basically a pointless exercise narrative wise. But fuck it I'm bored.

we know Kinger has been there the longest and Pomni the shortest (duh).

But I think Zooble is the newest next to Pomni. They are one of the youngest but she is also only just now fully challenging Jax's and getting closer to Gangle. This means they have not had a set dynamic with everyone and why they were still pretty raw about their appearance early on in the show. I think character wise it fits and explains a lot of their snappy nature early on.

i have no clue how is next between Jax and Gangle. but if I have to guess I would say Jax has been there longer simply do to the amount of rank pulling with Gangle he does (making her join his teams etc.)

Ragatha is the second longest out of the current crew one due to her age but also she did not get the breaking bad ref (more on that in a bit).

So the order is most likely:

Kinger

Ragatha

Jax

Gangle

Zooble

Pomni

But when did they get there is the next question. ep 5 is a gold mined for this as it shows who knows what. As mentioned Ragatha did not get the Breaking Bad ref it came out in 2008, so that's the cut off for her and Jax's uses more mid 2010's language (cringe, using youtuber as a noun ect.)

I have no clue when Kinger got there but lets say he has been there since the start, ok so the first VR headset used for gaming was in 1994

[in] 1994, Sega had released the VR-1 motion simulator ride attraction in Joypolis indoor theme parks, as well as the Dennou Senki Net Mercarcade game

Taken from the VR wiki

also the theme park thing seems like a relevant ref here.

Ragatha was a real estate agent in or around 2008 aka the housing crisis in the USA which is probably why she was around abandoned buildings, I am going to stay it was early to mid 2008 cause BB was around but didn't gangbusters until early season 2. so she may not have know about it even if it was out. And she is mostly likely the kind of co worker to take the jobs not body else wanted to be seen as more likeable.

Jax i would say it was around 2015 for the fact that he used youtuber as a job title and people were only able to get paid for their vid's since 2015. it also explains his very 'its just a prank bro' attitude that was very popular in that era of YT.

I think Ganagle being around the same time but later that year makes sense to me cause she would be about 20 in 2009 and working in Fast Food this could mean that she still had hope for her future (going to collage) but got crushed by the realities of the rescission and working in retail (fair and real).

side note I can't think of a reason for Gangle to be near the headset at all? like Pomi and Zobble just went to abandoned buildings for fun, Kinger likely worked on it, Ragatha would have been near it due to work, and Jax was running from something so he ended up in a random build at least tracks. But Ganagle? no idea, but here is some bullshit I pulled out of my ass:

she is an NPC and that is why she didn't get an evil version in ep 5

there was a headset at the McDonald's she worked at? maybe C&A made worker training videos?

she found it in the community collage as they were using old equipment to save money?

Zooble I feel would be a year later making it a bit awkward for her to fit in with everyone but also keep to herself for a descent amount of time.

so the final count is:

Kinger 1994 - Worker on the TADC

Ragatha 2008- Was a real estate agent inspecting a C&A building during the rescission

Jax 2015- a ran away who found a C&A building (maybe)

Gangle 2015- ?????

Zooble 2016- Urban explorer

Pomni 2017- Urban explorer

[sheepcreature]

Spitfire n Jawbreaker should get mood regulation classes with Elita and Grimlock, and just. learn not to fucking crash out during stressful situations and under the tiniest amount of pressure.,.,. pfufhfj,,

Spitfire struggles the most with the lessons, her outbursts are quicker and more sporadic compared to JB.

I think both have broken things before during outbursts, Spitfire pretends the things get lost and never acknowledges what she's broken, Jawbreaker ends up confessing in tears about it..

[scarlet-and-salt]

really early in dawntrail and i'm actually liking it a lot so far. i like the wol being like a mentor/dm pc type character. especially for my wol bc her perception of wuk lamat is this

[thechosenone-if]

The origins of the game

If you are new here, or relatively new, you might not know how The Chosen One came to be.

It was 2020 and, as many other, to escape reality I started playing VNs and then IFs. Within some months, a game of my own started to take shape in my mind and then I started writing. At the time, I had absolutely zero knowledge about Twine so learning it was a slow and painful process - but worth it.

In spring 2021 I created the Tumblr blog dedicated to it, what is now my personal blog @kal-down and what was then @/the-upperworld.

The first version of TCO was full of bugs, had a colour palette that was all over the place, and, most importantly, was only written in italian. At the time, I couldn't fantom writing a full story in english, I only did small prompts about MC and Rascia on the blog or translated previews.

Then, mainly thanks to the IF authors I came to befriend on here, I decided to translate the whole demo and publish the inglish version, which became public in September 2021.

During that year's summer, I also started planning and designing what would become my most popular and loved game: The King's Hound. As I made more and more progress on it, with so much difficulty and writing fully in english for the first time in my life, TCO started to feel off.

I guess lack of popularity and interaction, perhaps due to a story featuring a single RO or perhaps due to the unpolished nature of the writing. Still, I deleted almost everything from the blog and made it my personal one, hiding the game from Itchio.

In 2022 I decided to polish the UI a bit, thanks to it you have a now playable and hopefully more aesthetically pleasing game. I also added the Interlude 1 to the game (introducing Rascia for the first time).

And now, here we are. There isn't new content available to play, progress is still very slow, but I think this game deserves a proper blog. It deserves a place to be discussed, especially since I have a published demo and even if it won't ever be popular, I hope the game resonates at least with someone. For this reason, I decided I will leave the game up and visible on Itch from now on, and that I will keep working on it even if I remain the only one interested in the project.

It was my very first IF and I don't want to be ashamed of it. Or hide it. Despite its flaws and hiccups in developement, I am proud of it.

Thank you for reading, I wish you all a great day❤

[milfbrainrot]

i open twitter for 2 seconds and already have something to complain about

i guess i am a little fascinated by how within the specific contexts of communities like fandoms, you can end up with so much pushback to societal norms that those norms become targets within those communities. it's... understandable, but it can still become a problem with how people treat others and how they can wrap right back around to enforcing certain norms in odd ways?

like. as an example i sometimes get rly tired of m/m dominating fandom spaces. no one's doing anything wrong, but in fandom m/m is typically the "norm" to ship so it becomes kinda hard to fit in if you don't ship it. this can make people like me be more inclined to be assholes about m/m being the expectation in fandom when in reality... gay men are oppressed irl... so it can become homophobic (and just fuckin rude) at certain angles if you're not extremely careful to discuss the nuances of the attitude sometimes surrounding m/m and instead go "all m/m bad and the people who ship it are bad."

m/f shippers can also become targets because people get too tired of seeing m/f everywhere in media so people feel like it's being pushed on them when they're just trying to explore f/f. you're not like, being heterophobic j;llkajsdklf but it does make shippers targets at times regardless of their own identities or the characters' identities--bisexuality, trans, etc. and it also makes them targets for people's misplaced irl grievances about societal norms.

anyway what i saw was a dumbass ar@ne thread about how vi would never be pregnant, with multiple people saying it's misogynistic to assume all women want kids and they just don't see her wanting kids, while ignoring the genuine responses talking about how, since vi never talked about whether she wants kids, you can still use context clues about how much she cared for her little sister as proof she could be a good parent. whether she'd want it or not isn't something canon can prove. maybe she'd get tired of always looking out for others and decide against it, maybe it's something she would actually want to have for herself. we do not know.

no one was forcing a character who explicitly talks about never wanting kids to have kids lol, and even then... you can genuinely take a character on any journey to get from any point A to any point B because that's what real life is like, and it's not misogynistic to go "sometimes people do change their minds" as a general statement because sometimes people DO. i used to be dead set against ever having kids and now it's something i'm open to. it is awful that ppl who explicitly say they don't want kids irl get talked down to and told they'll change their mind, but that is not... what's happening here and it's not inherently what would happen if you did have a character change their mind because it can stem from a different place than what makes irl instances misogynistic.

ANYWAY. BACK ON TRACK. this all started because someone talked about trans!cait/vi for this to biologically work. so. you guys are talking about it being misogynistic to... have a queer couple have kids? do you guys not realize that straight couples can be revolutionary when one or both are trans? do you not realize the discrimination queer couples face irl when trying to do family planning? if you really want to play politics here, then you guys are being narrow-minded actually.

what stood out to me most, really, is that... even without the trans!cait context, the repeated instances of "vi would never be pregnant because it just doesn't seem like her" takes refusing to actually engage with comments about her characterization immediately read to me as "i am uncomfortable when butch lesbians get pregnant because i am too narrowminded to understand that people who aren't feminine can carry children." this is a huge issue so many butches have talked about regarding their own pregnancies because people don't realize how much they've connected the idea of pregnancy with femininity, or the connotations of maternal. this is something i have had to think about for myself as a nb lesbian who leans masc and does want to experience pregnancy down the line.

i'm not saying this is the case for everyone in that thread but... they weren't exactly making a case for anything else lmfao.

generally babyfic/kidfic/pregnancy headcanons are looked down upon in fandom for the reasons i mentioned above, where it's pushed on people so much already that when it ~invades~ fandom spaces where people are going to escape norms, people are a lot more comfortable turning their discomfort into harassment or black and white understandings making every instance ever inherently a hate crime to them personally. literally anything can have harmful trends because we're all people doing our best to create things we don't always have the skills or social awareness to do well, but these tropes do get quite a bit of odd hate at times that i think is... at times understandable but mostly undeserved. i am also biased as someone who has had a complicated journey unraveling my own lack of or actual desire to one day have kids. and in the times we live in of course these tropes are even more repulsive to people because of their very real fears surrounding their own reproductive rights.

all that to say i don't think any trope inherently deserves to be equated with the potential harm a person could do exploring it, and i don't even think that should always be treated with the same weight as enforcing societal pressure and norms. there is a difference between "this character has a kid" and "in my story ALL the characters have kids in ways that are clearly influenced by societal norms i have not yet unpacked." and i also think there are so many nuances to irl instances of people sticking to a norm but in an unconventional way, that it is concerning to see people get SO black and white about fictional headcanoning in ways that are just so narrow-minded i have to wonder how they treat """straight""" couples at pride or if they're the type to keep recreating Man And Woman genders by associating cottagecore with women and dark academia with men.

[elkriens]

Haha. What if I rewrote the entirety of mekakucity actors and make it into a fanfiction. What if.