I feel like we as Fanders really sleep on Mr Fuzzy. i mean.
look at him! he’s adorable! he’s handmade for virgil from joann’s fabrics! He doesn’t like being dropped!
I do like to think that Virgil tried to get rid of him as soon as remus was gone, through burning, but Mr Fuzzy wasn’t even hot when the fire died. Then he tried shredding him. Mr Fuzzy stitched himself back together.
A vat of acid. Mr Fuzzy absorbs it.
Stabbing. Mr Fuzzy heals almost instantly.
Burying. Mr Fuzzy appears on top of the ground the next day, not a speck of dirt on him.
Tying a rock to it and throwing it in a lake of the mindscape. Mr Fuzzy just floats to the top.
Eventually, Virgil just throws him as far as he can and calls it a day. The next morning, Mr Fuzzy is sitting there on his dresser, a little black nest around him. He’s here to stay, and Virgil has to accept that.
Can I be honest crk twitter kinda saps the fun out of any kind of updates at all because everyone is so negative all the time like idk if im even excited for millennial tree finally coming to kingdom because i know everyone is going to nitpick every little thing about it and every five post is going to be arguments about the update regardless of what happens at the end of the day
I hope the rmd mc for kasumi is a bit different cuz she rly be hittin on my last nerve and I don’t think she would rly v✨i✨b✨e with kasumi in her current given state
i’ve decided i need to play matsunaga and cc before getting a better sense of the eicu guys but honestly some of these recent asks feel like my own brain jumped out of my head and started sending me anon asks lmao bc i totally agree. anyway i know it’s a controversial opinion to not like the rmd mc and i’m TRYING to be fair and put aside my bias against her and try to analyse what exactly it is that i don’t like, but yeah i just don’t really find that she has romantic chemistry with the characters (that i’ve read, i.e. takado and hosho). not that anyone ever asked for this, buuuuuut this ask has basically triggered yet another mc rant so stop reading here or get ready and settle down with some popcorn lmao.
DISCLAIMER: this is all just my personal opinion! and i’m sure many of you will disagree with me. please place a “i think/believe/feel” before every claim i make as everything i say here is just my own feeling towards her. i also need to disclaim that i have only properly read takado and hosho’s routes (bc i’m still...mad at sen’s route, and i’ve only made it through one chapter of matsunaga so far) and i understand (and fully subscribe to) the idea that mcs read differently depending on the route as well. and as always, please don’t let my opinions affect your own enjoyment of any characters or titles that you love!
ALSO as i was writing this, i went back and read my previous rant about her and i realised that i’m more or less reiterating the same points i made there but in a (hopefully) more structured and slightly more developed manner whoops.
so here’s almost 3000 words and a whole bunch of screenshots under the cut because i don’t want to spam everyone’s dashboards with my unprompted Opinions(tm).
so anyway i’ve been thinking it’s a translation/tone thing. when i have the time/energy, i might sit down and really try to analyse the actual language, but just going off my intuition, i think maybe it’s because:
1. sometimes they choose to express something idiomatically and so that tone doesn’t come across as sincere. this isn’t a real example, but let’s think about the difference in tone between “oh no!” and “yikes”. because of modern day vernacular, we kind of associate “yikes” with a sarcastic and judgmental tone, whereas “oh no!” might connote a more genuinely concerned reaction. so sometimes i think that the use of very contemporary vernacular (which, lbr, trends towards a more sarcastic tone in general bc us gen z kids are mean) results in a lack of sincerity which makes the mc come across as a little more callous and less... actually kind and nice? i did get the feeling that hlitf mc has recently swayed towards this sort of tone as well and suspected that they had the same translator (which was confirmed later in a voltage Q&A). i’m definitely #biased but i can forgive this more because we had a good amount of content with her being adorable before the tone switch so i have a pre-established impression of her in my mind.
by the way, i just want to say that while i do have this critique, i do really admire and respect the voltage translation and localisation team (and am... super indebted to them) and i do think they do fantastic translations generally.
anyway, i believe this linguistic issue is at least partially responsible for my personal perception of the rmd mc’s personality that i expand on in the succeeding points, but my next point has more to do with the writing and characterisation of the most recent wave of mcs.
2. rmd mc has very few visible vulnerabilities. i think this is one of my biggest qualms with the new title mcs like rmd, destind and mk but i think stories are at their best when you get to see the mc fail and be vulnerable and wallow. the reason why i love certain mcs - particularly the ones whose titles and storylines centre around their careers (hlitf, irresistible mistakes, my last first kiss, scandal, celebrity darling, kiss of revenge, sleepless, otbs, arguably msb, etc.) - is because we get to see them fail and then grow. not only that, but you often get to see the relationship between the mc and the love interest deepen in these moments. but if you have a ‘perfect’ mc, then there’s no room for growth, so plotlines are forced to fall back on drama and trauma on the love interest’s side which... is exactly what rmd and mk do.
this is not to say that rmd mc doesn’t make mistakes, because she certainly does, but i don’t find that they’re ever genuinely serious mistakes. for example, think about hlitf mc’s repeated mistake in season 1 of going after small crimes without seeing the bigger picture and thus potentially messing up an entire investigation. they allow her that space to mess up and be completely wrong for public safety. then they give her the time to be self-reflective and run away back to nagano really think about what her mistakes are, and where to go from there. she is confronted with humbling failure, and is forced to address issues about her own pride/ego, and matures into someone who has a more nuanced idea about justice. on the other hand, rmd mc never has to (consistently, afaik) go through a genuinely humbling experience, so she her pride/ego/arrogance never gets seriously called into question. maybe this is because the premise of rmd has to do with life and death and they don’t want to make it seem like she’s directly responsible for someone’s death, but hlitf also deals with life and death issues and the mc learns that if she messes up to save one civilian, she may actually be jeopardising the lives of tens or hundreds or more.
anyway, taking takado’s route as an example, because this was our exposure to her as a character, the most frustrating thing is the way that she tries to lecture takado that he’s wrong about his attitude towards amputations, and never actually has to personally experience the potentially disastrous consequence of putting her ideology into practice. i think i would have enjoyed the route a lot more if she had gone over his head and naively made the decision not to do an amputation and then the person ended up dying or having to have a larger section amputated all because she was like uwu we can’t just cut off people’s limbs without waiting. i think if that situation had happened, we could have seen her actually have to confront her own naiveté and realise that she’s a noob and too idealistic and that reading a lot of medical journals does not translate to having actual field experience and intuition and who is she to question him like that when she knows nothing. she only realises that omg... we may have to consider some things with something called nuance... basically when more of takado’s backstory is revealed.
(maybe this is because i work in academia so it extra-frustrates me, but omg if i had to one-on-one mentor a student like her, i would genuinely go nuts. she reminds me of some students that some colleagues and i have had where they “well, actually” at everything you say bc they read some stuff on reddit or twitter that has absolutely not been proven through practical application of, or research conducted through the lens of, their theory. like imagine i told my advisors “despite being experts in [their respective fields] and having written numerous very important books, you’re wrong because i don’t agree but i have never myself conducted proper research to counter that!!”)
basically i wish they treated takado’s route like kaga’s routes (bc lbr takado and kaga are maybe... the same person?). look at the self-reflection here:
and here:
she does get down on herself at times, but look at the way that she humbly accepts her mistakes. sometimes she wallows on her mistakes, as anyone would, but look at the way she examines her failures and turns that feeling of inadequacy into motivation to work harder and smarter.
by the way, these screenshots are from his ms1 and ms2 - so pretty early on - and we get to see her learn from these mistakes because she’s allowed to make them. we also get to learn more about kaga’s strictness and his kindness because of these mistakes.
i don’t know if the whole refusal to allow rmd mc to make significant errors is a response to readers who are like “omg.... why are voltage mcs so weak, why can’t they be perfect women who never get anything wrong” but ANYWAY i just feel like they never confront or address her hubris properly.
3. following on from point 2, i find her one-dimensional. i’ve mentioned this before in a rant, but i don’t find her to be a very deep character bc to me, she reads as mostly surface level sass. i said: “her dialogue with them often reads as like they put 100 points in “snark” and 0 points in any other personality trait” lmao. so she’s great in one-off screenshots where you can see her bite back with a very screenshottable one-liner, but i find it tiring to have 30 chapters of her just literally running her mouth. because of this constant tone that they keep giving her, i find it really difficult to see any emotional depth in her character. because she’s the perspective character, her internal dialogue is just as, if not more, important as the love interest’s external dialogue in terms of carrying the emotional weight of falling in love, and i just don’t understand how there’s any sense of two people falling in love and getting to know each other when every sentence out of her mouth is just sass. can you imagine you meet someone and you get to know them but never have any genuine conversations bc every line out of your mouth is sarcastic? like your date is opening up and telling you about some difficulties he’s going through (which i’m sure you all know is a very vulnerable and scary thing to do) and instead of being empathetic and kind and understanding, you’re just like “sucks to be you dude”. and instead of saying “you don’t need to carry everything on your shoulders”, you say “you’re STUBBORN and i’m RIGHT”. OF COURSE i’m being kind of hyperbolic here (not even that much tho, see screenshots below) but that’s basically the tone she constantly takes.
so when takado opens up about the rina thing, instead of being like “oh shit i’ve been judging him all this time and i’m genuinely sorry because i didn’t know a thing about you and yet i’ve been running my mouth”, she says “your head is as hard as a rock ya know?” and then KEEPS GOING.
where’s the empathy sis? where is it? i’m looking but i can’t find it.
EVEN TAKADO WAS LIKE “I WAS TRYING TO TALK SERIOUSLY ABOUT IT”
and then the writers just push off her rudeness as like “it’s okay it’s chill!! takado laughed about it afterwards and it made the issue sound insignificant!!” even tho it’s obviously an extremely traumatic thing? WHY does he even fall in love with her??? i don’t UNDERSTAND alsdkfjs she has NO FEELINGS!! i just want genuinely romantic moments... is that too much to ask... it’s called romance md...
once again, let’s compare that to hlitf mc, when she finds out about kaga’s trauma. literally the FIRST reaction she has is to consider his feelings.
without even hearing his side of the story, she defends him because she trusts him and immediately empathises with him and the first thing she does is try to understand him and where he’s coming from.
later on, when she hears him just dismissing things and playing callous, she actually cries on his behalf, which shocks him because he’s not used to people caring about him:
isn’t that a MASSIVE difference in reaction to essentially the same character opening up about their trauma? which do you find more conducive to developing emotional intimacy? in my opinion, it’s so much easier to fall in love with someone who supports you and has your back and trusts and believes in you and tries to understand you and can have a genuinely caring conversation with you when you need it. by the way, it’s not like kaga’s mc doesn’t sass him either! they have great bantery chemistry and she shit-talks him ALL THE TIME (a lot of the time under her breath and he’s like HUH? it’s great).
and yet... we still actively see her caring about him... instead of being like WHOOPS my tongue slipped, i can’t help that i’m naturally insubordinate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by the way, i’m not trying to put the onus on female characters/heroines to be caring/empathetic/kind/loving. i’m putting the onus on ALL characters to be caring/empathetic/kind/loving in their own ways if we’re supposed to be convinced that they’re falling in romantic love. sure, kaga’s mc is exceptionally loving but kaga returns that love with his own ALL the time ;~~; anyway i’m gonna stop talking about them for now bc otherwise i would just completely derail and keep going on and on about them.
anyway, back to takado, i actually find him to be more caring and loving than his mc? i actually genuinely like takado as a character and i think that real life me and him would be great together so i’m like extra offended that he’s with her rather than ME??? i would treat him so much better.
i consider this lack of emotional depth to actually be a bigger hindrance on my enjoyment of the game than the lack of flaws thing. voltage’s recent wave of mcs with the love choice titles have been trending towards the ‘perfect woman’ type of mc, but while i have some Thoughts(tm) here and there about the other protagonists, none of them strike me as being as hard to get along with as rmd’s mc. so i’ve mentioned my issue with the masukisu mc’s weird moral boundaries (more an overall voltage issue that manifests the most strongly in her character), but i also do find that they don’t let her make big mistakes and they present her as this perfect superwoman figure with no weaknesses which like... unrelatable. but at least her banter is flirty banter and there’s a lot of chemistry there (even if it’s sometimes lacking emotional depth, as in some of kazuomi’s scenes - and that’s not her fault, that’s 100% on kazuomi lol). you can definitely understand why they’re attracted to each other at least, and you can definitely see real, deep love form between her and yuzuru the most. even though the masukisu mc is a ‘perfect woman’, the premise is designed to spark relationship conflict and the writing really helps us understand the emotional turmoil of falling in love with a target because of how much it lets the mc dwell on it. destind too basically has a perfect mc in terms of work/career, but they let her have her very glaring weaknesses and, once again, the premise forces her to address her shortcomings with regards to her idealistic view on soulmates/destiny and explores the head vs heart thing where she has to really examine her emotions and how they potentially come into conflict with her preconceptions of and preoccupation with numerical compatibility.
thinking about it objectively, i feel like takado’s mc and mlfk ayato’s mc have a couple of similarities in the way that they don’t realise they’re in love for the longest time (although obviously childhood friends to lovers provides a better context for not realising that love - same with my boi natsume), but there’s just something lovable about mlfk’s mc that i don’t see in rmd. without going too deeply into it bc (1) i’m tired and (2) i’ve been going on about this for WAY too long now, i think that comes back to tone or writing (and possibly translation) style. i think at some point, i might actually go and compare the language in the “omg am i in love...?” scenes between takado’s mc, ayato’s mc and natsume’s mc but uh... not tonight haha.
actually, at some point, i genuinely wondered if rmd mc was aromantic. i really just thought she did not experience romantic attraction because i literally got no sense of it through her internal monologue bc they kept pushing the whole like “i only relate to people’s ~aesthetics~” thing. and then i wondered how they were going to make an aromantic mc fall in romantic love...? because... it’s an otome game? (btw i’m not saying that aro people can’t enjoy otoge, i definitely know people who do! but there’s a big diff between someone playing an otoge vs someone being a character falling in romantic love in an otoge. but please call me out if i’m misunderstanding aromanticism!). anyway, long story short, rmd mc (takado’s especially) falling in love is absolutely unconvincing to me because i find her dialogue - both internal and external - rather unfeeling.
these three points (1. translation that favours colloquialism over communicating emotional tone; 2. characterisation of a hubristic mc who doesn’t need to overcome significant challenges; 3. lack of emotional depth and empathy/understanding) are basically why i don’t think that she has good romantic chemistry with the love interests in romance md that i’ve read so far. i also have some very petty personal gripes (sekai...........) but they’re not relevant to this particular topic and frankly just... really petty so i don’t want to get into them here.
so anyway, long story short: i agree that i don’t think she would really vibe with kasumi in her current given state. like, they could be friends, maybe.
U know what fuck it I'm tired. Stop making fun of characters 4 crying a lot I've got chronic stress nd cry all the damn time bc I'm constantly at my stress line!!! Crying isn't even bad why the hell do ppl love making fun of characters 4 no reason you'll get mad when a charater fucking cries what is wrong w/ u
@valorandgold It's one thing that "The Rite of Turnabout" has a lazy premise. But it's the first trial day that really makes me angry. It's a giant contrived mess, basically. Datz's entire testimony can go to hell for being completely pointless. And while I now know the truth, I still feel like Nick could have argued Datz as a suspect since you know, he's this vicious rebel that's considered armed and dangerous. Datz's "motive" could have been killing the high priest for being such a beloved figure of the government. And out of nowhere Nahyuta suggests that Maya stabbed the high priest from behind with a reverse grip. But he has literally no evidence of this, not even the murder weapon since that had yet to be found. Nahyuta also suggests that Maya disguised the bird statue as Lady Keera despite this blatantly contradicting the Divination Seance. Even after learning what really happened, this still makes no sense in context of the first trial day. And despite all this, Maya is still declared guilty despite the holes Nick has opened in the case and how shaky the Prosecution's case is in the first place. This is Turnabout Serenade levels of contrived nonsense.
Desperately need more trans masc main characters. I feel like i’m going insane based on the fact that i don’t see myself in any media. Every trans piece of media i’ve found has been mainly focused on trans women and i just can’t stand being told “and he’s also there” anymore. i’m frustrated and tired and lonely and just need someone.
fuckin hot take but it's not "easier" to be a trans man
one of my trans femme friends keeps offhandedly mentioning that it's so much easier to be a trans guy and i can't stand it. i know she means well and she's just speaking from her own experience, but i'm so tired of hearing how easy it is.
Just because trans men aren't under the microscope of conservatives and testosterone causes voice changes doesn't mean that it's easier. There is no guarantee that i'll have the ideal effects of T.
I'm still short, and there are nearly no short guys where i live. Taking T doesn't mean I'm going to immediately get a deep voice, it doesn't even mean that i'll get it eventually. I might have to do voice training my whole life because T doesn't guarantee a deep voice. It doesn't guaranteed fat redistribution. It doesn't guarantee facial hair. It doesn't necessarily guarantee most of the things I need for this.
Testosterone is considered a performance enhancer, meaning it's kinda difficult to do competitive sports. Even without T, i can’t exercise with a binder for very long because it’s literally not safe. And hiding the outline of my body, especially in the summer months, is so goddamn difficult.
Wearing pants and baggy clothes doesn't immediately make me look more masculine because of our expanded ideas for what women can wear. I am NOT saying that I want women to go back to being forced to wear only dresses and skirts and the like. I'm simply saying that this is why people don't see me as more masculine. Just because I have short hair doesn't mean I'll be seen as a man because I will be described as a Tomboy. I'm so tired of assumptions that i'm a cis masc lesbian. I'm so fucking done with it.
As soon as I wear a dress or a skirt or a crop top or even just the color pink, so many people stop treating me like a man. They think I’m not even trying or something. I’m exhausted of this.
To any trans femmes/trans women reading this who say it’s easier:
We are on the same fucking team. Trans men and trans women are not enemies. We are brothers and sisters. We are the brothers of our nonbinary siblings just as you are the sisters of them. We are family. Our experience isn’t easier, it’s just different. Our fight should not be with each other, it should be with those who are trying to stop BOTH and ALL of us from being allowed to live as who we are.
