#shenaniganry

[serasentowermage]

[an-inky-fingered-lass]

Let Me Speak: A Character Study

(A story of life, love, and hope; of sorrow, struggle, and rebuilding after loss. A story of everything a life can be, and all the ways it matters. A character study of Melinda May, and the parts of her story they didn’t tell.)

. . .

PART ONE

At the age of six years old, Melinda Qiaolian May knew two things:

One—regardless of the cheerful ribbing from her father about children and the things they would understand when they were older, she would not, at any point in her life, enjoy coffee. (This assertion stood the test of time, as it turned out, a fact Melinda maintained with righteous dignity throughout her life).

Two—she was not afraid of heights. 

There were other things she knew, of course, and things she was very much afraid of. But — there are priorities. As she grew older, Melinda liked to keep a count of all the things that didn’t scare her, and practiced leaning into the way those certainties weighed steady on her spine when shadows stretched strangely in the night. 

Continue reading on ao3.

[starrysundae]

gives you 5 dabloons

gives you 5 snoolbad as payment

[life-in-deathhh]

the wages of war are a burden to the soul, to the very essence of what it means to be human, a vicious sensory violation as your blood leaves with your will to live. im not sure how much longer i can take it

[superlativesamsara]

Nata: *Posts Sheep*

Anon: *Says Baa"

Nata: *exclaims Baa! and then curses Pavlov's name.*

Yep just an average day on tumblr.

[missdreawrites]

Far Cry 5, and How I Feel a Week after Beating It

@weekend-writer, here we go. Hold on to your butts.

I just recently finished Far Cry 5, and mid-way through the playthrough, someone asked if I thought it was worth the 60$ USD and I had originally said yes. Now, having completed the game, I’m rethinking that stance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sorry I bought the game for full price, but I’m definitely a bit - sad over it. So I’m going to go through the game point by point, in a somewhat blistering, disappointed review.

Obviously, beyond the cut, there are SPOILERS ahead.

Let me start this out by saying I enjoyed seventy-five percent of this game. The graphics were amazing, the outposts were all unique, the characters were priceless (fucking Hurk Jr, man, I love him so much and dude, I ran around with a bear named Cheeseburger). The music was fantastic. I loved the theme, and the battle music, and even the scary uber-Christian hymns that played on Eden’s Gate Radio.

Now, for those of you who are looking for a bit of a rundown, the game is about a Rookie Deputy Sheriff - hereby known as Rook for the rest of this review. You play the Rook who goes to Eden’s Gate, an uber Christian cult in the middle of Hope County, Montana. You, Deputy Hudson, Deputy Pratt, and a US Marshall go to arrest the leader of this cult, Joseph Seed.

Like in Far Cry 4, you have a choice in the very beginning of the game. You can choose not to arrest Joseph - though you have to loiter for ten minutes or so as your partners and boss get increasingly angry with you, but eventually the Sheriff decides you’re right, this is not a battle we want to fight, let’s just go. Credits.

However, if you actually want to play the game, you have arrest Joseph and bring him to your chopper, wherein all hell breaks loose, and you crash because of course you do. Joseph Seed tells you that arresting him was breaking the first “seal” and anyone who has watched Supernatural within the last thirteen years knows what that means.

The rest of the events in the game are not all that important to this review, only that Joseph Seed has several siblings that you have to defeat to get to him after you escape and are set loose on the region.

There’s John Seed, a torturer who has Deputy Hudson. He’s obsessed with cleansing people of their sins. There’s Jacob Seed, a war veteran who has so many PTSD issues I can’t actually list them all, and he’s a manipulator who believes the weak should be culled from the herd. He brainwashes you a la Bioshock, only he uses a song to do it. Then there’s Faith Seed, and she’s not actually related to them. She was a junkie who came to Joseph for help, and ended up helping him create Bliss, this hallucinogenic drug that stretches the bounds of reality just a bit too much.

There. Now.

You have to liberate each region (John, Jacob, and Faith respectively) in order to unlock the final confrontation with Joseph. Each region has a bar that has little bubbles on it, once reach those bubbles, those are essentially check points of “pissing off a Seed sibling” and they send Hunters out after you.

1. Mechanic I hate number the first one: the Hunting Party

So you’ve pissed off a Seed sibling! They send a Hunting Party after you. The party arrives - even if you fast travelled to a different region, or even the other side of the map. Or like me, you’re a stealthy snipery jerkface and you kill the entire party undetected as they yell about finding me and “use the Bliss Bullets, John/Jacob/Faith wants ‘em alive!”

I kill all eight of the hunting party, and breathe a sigh of relief. There are no more red markers, Boomer says no one else is around. I venture out of cover.

Blam.

Screen goes wavery, then sparkly. Then Rook falls unconscious. Despite having killed the party, or left the party or hidden, these are scripted events, so I literally can do nothing to save myself. I have to get kidnapped by the Seed sibling, for Plot Reasons.

Annoying but manageable.

2. Mechanic I hate number the second one: The Rook

Unlike in the rest of the Far Cry series, you are not a person. By which I mean, you’re not like Jason Brody or Ajay Ghale, or even Jack. You’re still the Rook, of course but you’re not voiced, you have no personality. You can be male or female, and the only person in the entire game that mentioned my gender as female was freakin’ Hurk.

Your character makes noise - when you’re hurt or falling, you grunt and groan and cry out, but you don’t talk. You don’t emote. You are just a blank canvas. What’s worse, is they didn’t bother recording two sets of dialogue like Bethesda did in Fallout 4.

So all the cultists just call you by a gender neutral sound. “Get ‘em!”/”I saw ‘em over there!”/”I got eyes on the sinner!”

Y’all. Y’all come on.

This is especially hard to stomach when the characters are spewing just the most ridiculous nonsense at you. There’s a moment after you get kidnapped by Jacob, and Joseph is there. He goes on this - truly awful and ridiculous monologue about how he used to be a different person, he was married, a baby on the way. How happy he was. Then there was an accident. His wife died, and the doctors saved the baby but the baby was sick, probably premature, and they said he had to be strong for his baby daughter.

TW: he is not strong for his baby daughter.

The rook doesn’t say a damn thing to this horrible man who admits he killed his baby daughter instead of taking care of her. The rook just watches him, from behind bars. Yo, I was livid. I was like WHAT THE FUCK YOU MURDERER HOW DARE YOU PREACH PEACE but nope. My character was totally silent.

Y’ALL.

3. Mechanic that I hate number the third one: the Ending (collectively)

WARNING: Here be spoilers. If you don’t care about me spoiling the entire ending confrontation with Joseph, keep on reading. Otherwise, feel free to skip down to the conclusion, which I’ve helpfully put in bold.

SO THE ENDING.

After you liberate each region, gather all your Roster, finish your side quests and helping each person you find, Joseph Seed contacts you - he offers to open up his compound so you two can finally have it out. Now, I’ll take this moment to say that I put it off for a bit. I ignored Joseph so I could finish side quests, and my partner, who beat the game two days before I did told me no, go do it, you won’t want to keep playing after. Why waste that time?

I was thoroughly alarmed by that statement. So even though it was almost seven in the morning and I’d stayed up all night to play it, I drove my ass to Joseph’s compound and in a mirror of the very beginning, walked up to the church.

Immediately, I am placed in a cut scene. This has happened a few times throughout the game, Whenever John Seed implored you to say “yes” to whatever tortures he wanted bestow on you, to talking with your allies. However, the length of this cutscene dragged on, until Joseph is done preaching at you.

He says he’ll give you an offer. That despite all you’ve done, despite the fact that you’ve killed his flock and family, he’s going to offer you peace. He’s going to do the “right thing” and offer you peace. You hear something behind you - still in a cutscene - and turn around to see all your friends. The roster you helped out, minus the animals, all Blissed out of their minds (as noted by the glowing cloud around their faces) and leading tied up people into the compound. They aim their guns at Deputy Pratt, Deputy Hudson and the Sheriff, all of whom have been recaptured by the people you thought were your friends. Joseph tells you if you resist, if you don’t choose peace, then you can kiss your friends goodbye.

Then you’re given the ability to choose two options: Resist or Accept.

IF YOU CHOOSE RESIST:

He knocks over some Bliss barrels, and everything gets all kinds of fucked up, and your friends attack Pratt, Hudson and the Sheriff. After you fight off Joseph for a second or two, you’re able to revive them (not a new mechanic, you can revive anyone during the rest of the game) and all four of you start fighting Joseph. You have to fight your roster as well, but once they go down, you’re able to revive them as well - which puts them back on your side. However, Joseph will also try to revive them, which leaves them your enemy.

I guess “killing them” and reviving them is like cognitive recalibration? Either way, once all your roster-friends are revived an on your side, you turn your attention to Joseph and shoot the fuck out of him. It’s real cathartic… until you beat him and are immediately locked into another cutscene.

While Joseph monologues at you, the Sheriff (your boss, essentially) comes up behind him, declares him under arrest, and handcuffs him. Joseph proclaims that another seal has broken, and then the entire screen shakes with some kind of impact. The cutscene shows you, Hudson, Pratt, and the Sheriff a giant mushroom cloud, not too far away from where you are, across the lake.

There’s a moment of shock, and Joseph declares it the end of the world, just like he predicted. He was right, and the end is upon us, etc, etc yadda.

We all run toward a car, with Joseph in tow, and then you’re given control back just long enough to drive helter skelter away from the shockwave, as shit is getting set on fire, until you’re suddenly locked in another cutscene just in time to slam into a falling tree.

The screen goes black and red, as you come to, realizing that Pratt, Hudson and the Sheriff are dead. The car door opens and you fall out, blacking back out. When you wake up again, you’re in a bunker - the same bunker you woke up in before being set loose on the county after the prologue, and who should be with you?

Joseph. Seed.

He tells you that everyone in Hope County is dead, and it’s all your fault, why couldn’t you have just picked peace? But hey, it doesn’t matter - we’re family now and one day, we’ll walk through Eden’s Gate together.

“I am your Father,” Joseph Seed says, leaning back in his seat, and staring at you with those wide eyes. “And you are my Child.” He locks eyes with you, never blinking, as the screen fades to black.

Credits.

I was in fucking shock. According to my partner who was awake on the couch and watching me play through this, I kept clicking my mouse like I was trying to pull my guns to shoot him. Why couldn’t I just shoot him?

Now, I’m willing to admit that a lot that might have been a hallucination - the cutscenes make use of the Bliss (which is hallucinogenic) a lot - even though when you aren’t in a cutscene the drug only behaves that way in the most minorest of ways. I’ve been running through fields of Bliss for ages, and all you get is weird sparkling on the corners of your screen. Sometimes you hallucinate Faith Seed, or animals that aren’t there.

However, ultimately, whether or not it was a hallucination doesn’t matter. Because the credits roll and the game is over. Hope County is gone, your friends, your allies, they’re gone. Your only companion is the man you failed to kill, the man you failed to arrest, and you’ve lost.

You lost.

So, utterly livid, I reloaded my save just before choosing Resist, and instead chose the other option.

IF YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT PEACE:

Joseph lets you go. He monologues a bit more, but he lets you, Hudson and Pratt, the Sheriff, he lets everyone go. You retreat to the edge of the Compound, get into the same truck you’d get into if you chose to resist, and start driving away. The Sheriff talks to you a little and ultimately what he says isn’t important, because the radio turns on, as you drive away.

Remember how I said Jacob Seed brainwashed you.... With a song?

The screen goes red as your character starts screaming, and then the screen goes black.

Roll credits.

The game is over. The last time that song played, when you did Jacob’s Region, you killed one of your allies because he brainwashed you into doing it. The entire lead up to killing Jacob is one big brainwashing suckfest, and you do things you don’t think you’re doing until it’s over.

It’s very, very clear that you’ll kill everyone in that car with you.

You lose. Everyone in that car knows how bad Joseph Seed is, they’re your survivors, your witnesses. The people who could have helped you get more manpower to come back and get rid of Joseph with more than a song and a prayer.

But you kill them. You lose.

Both of these endings mean that the ninety hours I spent playing were useless. Nothing I did mattered. Either the world fucking ends, or you murder the people you spent the whole game trying to save. Nothing you did matter, you made no difference, and you lose.

I have nothing against games where you don’t win. I have nothing against games where the ending message is you lose. I have serious issues with being plot railroaded via cutscene into endings I don’t want. Why couldn’t I shoot Joseph? I shot Faith, and Jacob and John. Clearly due process wasn’t important THEN, so why are we arresting Joseph? He’s a dangerous man who knows how to use a dangerous drug to mind control people - but yeah sure, let’s arrest him.

CONCLUSION:

Am I disappointed I bought the game? No, not really. I’m glad I played.

However, I was left with this - bad taste in my mouth, a little. The endings were lackluster, I feel like a require closure to move on with my life - especially because I beat it a week ago, and I’m still stewing over the ending.

Like the original ending of Mass Effect 3, where I was left in shock, I hope that Ubisoft hears how disappointing those endings were and gives us a miniature DLC (to go along with the three weird ones they already have) that gives us a better option.

To the anon who asked me if it was worth the 60$ USD, I originally answered your ask saying yes, because I loved the game.

I hope you see this, and note that my answer has changed. If you’re a hardcore fan of the series, like me, sure - spend the 60. But if you’re not? If you’re a casual player who just liked the idea of the plot - give it a miss, until the next Steam Summer Sale or Xbox Gold Give Away.

This is a little disjointed, I started it while I was at work and then slept before finishing it but I am free and available for any questions via ask/message system. Anon hate about loving the endings will be added to the fire and will fuel the heating for my house. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

[serasentowermage]

Okay, so for today's nonsense, the prompt was 'most unhinged ways to derail Jason's Red Hood revenge plot.' I have seen various posts about Jason or Tim or even Bruce getting turned into a cat and discovering things like Hood's identity or familial love, etc, etc. That's all well and good, but I am officially That Person With The Bird Obsession, so. You can probably guess where this is going.

Nightwing gets turned into a bird; Red Hood sees it happen. Jason goes to pick up the bird, because even if he's pissed at him, he can't let Dick wander around Gotham as a goddamn cockatiel. He also can't just hand Batman a bird and say it's his son, how would he prove and/or justify that? So he's stuck with the obnoxious, parrot form of his older brother.

Dick, meanwhile, is freaking out because he's 1) been turned into a pet and 2) is currently in the hands of a dangerous crimelord who could easily end his life just by squeezing too hard. So when Hood starts asking him questions to see if Nightwing is still in there or if he's literally, functionally a bird, Dick pulls out the most convincing act of his life and pretends to be a cockatiel. Full-on no thoughts, head empty, screech and flap and do a head bob.

Dick: Shit, what do cockatiels do? Think, Grayson, remember all those bird videos you watched!

Dick: *starts whistling the chorus to September while headbanging*

Jason: ...I literally can't tell if this is out of character or not.

[serasentowermage]

Six Cryptids, One Bird

I’ve been thinking about cryptid Bat-family again, so here’s a very long ramble for you guys.

For background, let’s say that cryptids can sense each other. For some, it’s in the way the air currents don’t quite move the way they should around a certain individual. For others, it’s in the way the light hits them just a bit wrong, or the way their shadow is just a shade or two too dark. Maybe it’s the way their voice echoes, or a certain smell. The point is, they know. They always know. 

So when Bruce Wayne picks Dick Grayson up off the bloodied sawdust of Haly’s’ center ring, he knows the boy is human. He knows this is a traumatized, grieving, human child, and he doesn’t want to scare him. He doesn’t want to add to Dick’s nightmares. So he doesn’t tell him. Even when Dick starts to smile again, starts to grow past his trauma, Bruce doesn’t say a word, because now it’s too awkward. He’s kept the secret too long. What would he even say, at this point, that wouldn’t come across as patronizing or a lack of trust? And so he says nothing.

Then Dick leaves, and Bruce finds a baby cryptid stealing his tires. This time, he doesn’t have to worry about explaining himself, because Jason Todd already knows. He can sense Bruce as easily as Bruce sensed him. And when Dick comes back, angry and hurt that Bruce gave away his name, Bruce doesn’t tell him the truth. He doesn’t want Dick to think Bruce fired him for being human, or to feel like he wasn’t enough. He asks Jason not to tell Dick either, and Jason agrees. It’s obvious his so-called brother is already less than pleased with him - the last thing he wants is to give Dick another reason to hate him.

(Nevermind that Dick isn’t mad at Jason, not really. He knows it’s not the kid’s fault. He’s not ready, yet, to be an older brother, but he’ll get there.)

Then Jason dies, and everything goes to hell. Dick is gone again, and Tim Drake, spawned from the shadowed depths of Gotham, pushes his way into the light to make sure Batman doesn’t fall. He doesn’t question it when Bruce orders him to keep their otherness a secret. After all, he’s Batman. He must have a good reason, and Tim is very good at hiding. He’s been doing it his whole life.

Time moves on, and the family grows. Jason comes back. Steph and Cass appear, slowly working their way beneath the Batman’s sheltering cape. They all recognize each other for what they are, and they all keep each other’s secrets. When Damian arrives, full of spite and fear and superiority, he holds tight to his mother’s advice: to conceal his nature like the weapon it is, brought into the open only for the final strike. His not-siblings may already know what he is, but Grayson remains oblivious, and Damian knows better than to give up an advantage. 

(But then he gets to know Dick, starts to trust and maybe even love him, and that final, decisive blow never comes.)

Bruce has gathered a total of five other cryptids and one human under his care. He’s kept his secret for so long. They’ve all kept their secrets, and now none of them know how to confess. They feel bad for keeping it from Dick, but they’re too embarrassed, too guilty, too afraid to do anything about it. So they leave it be. It’s a miserable, family-wide conspiracy to keep the truth from their poor, oblivious, human brother.

Here’s the thing, though - Dick Grayson is not human. He’s not a cryptid, either. He’s a Fae. And while he may not know exactly what his family members are, he can tell there’s something supernatural there. He’s not going to push them about it, though. That would be rude. Instead, he resolves to let them set the pace. They’ll come to him when they’re ready, he’s sure.

And so, while the whole family is running around, jumping through hoops to conceal their strangeness from him, Dick is happily living his bird life and making a point to gently remind them, every once in a while, that if they need to talk about anything - anything at all - he’d be glad to listen. :)