#tiefling-queer

[grenadefestival]

*kicks in the door* OH IF I CAN ROMANCE MAGGIE THEN THAT'S JUST THE BEST OPTION!

Maggie is...best girl...

You don’t find Maggie, Maggie finds you. You’ll run into her first at the university, and from there she becomes a reoccurring character. In your first interaction with her, there’s really no way to seriously upset her, and of all the romanceable characters, her starting friendship score is the highest. If you select every single dialogue option with max friendship points, you can max out the friendship score only a quarter of your way into the game. At a glance, her route seems like it would be the easiest to complete. However, she’s one of those characters where your friendship score with other characters absolutely matters. You could get a perfect score in all your scenes with Maggie, but if your friendship scores with too many other characters are low (or god forbid in the negatives) then you’ll see diminishing returns in your interactions with her, and some dialogue options may actually become locked because she’s started to pick up on your rancid vibes. You’ll still be able to be friends with her, but you won’t be able to date her at the end. 

You also need to be mindful of your romance scores with other characters. Some characters such as Ollie, Spider, and Hag won’t care at all if you also have a high romance score with someone else, and others such as Wing, Cordelia, and Nil don’t take much convincing when you insist you’re only interested in them, but Maggie is basically your wingman right from the start. If she thinks you’re seriously interested in someone else, it’s nearly impossible to romance her. Why would you play games with Maggie’s heart? Commit.

Note: Because you can’t talk about Maggie’s route in this game without mentioning it, there is a point of no return if you wait too long to start romancing her. About half way through the game, after the cutscene where you randomly get mugged, is the prime point to start romancing her if you haven’t started already, but if you get too far past that (about 3/4 the way into the game) and your romance scores with both her and Burger are still below half, then she and Burger end up together, and there’s no way to roll that back. You can still squeak out a good end with some characters at the 3/4 mark, but Maggie is not one of them.

[equalseleventhirds]

my interpretation of aligning with a fear is that it's the way that trauma impacts you. i get the feeling you're not interested in anything i have to say vis-a-vis tim's characterization, so i won't get into that, but my understanding of avatars/avatar powers and becoming one wittingly or unwittingly is that it very rarely, if ever, has to do with what someone wants or their own happiness, and everything to do with trauma. tma to me is in part a story of the monsters trauma makes of us.

imo it varies from avatar to avatar; jude willingly chose the desolation, mike went in search of the vast after rejecting things that had traumatized him, peter was raised to it and embraced it, simon loved the sky, etc etc. i’d agree that avatarhood is not necessarily a major choice, but it can absolutely play a part.

if the thing that traumatizes you first and biggest has claim to you, jon would be a web avatar. martin would have gone the way of corruption. melanie might have gone stranger. basira would be desolation, or dark, or hunt. but what they all wound up aligned with was eye, because eye managed to get its hooks in them and make them work for it, not just be its victim.

according to the story, what actually got tim in its clutches (for as much as the entities hold true, which, they don’t, and inasmuch as ‘avatar’ is a thing, which, it isn’t, but putting that aside) was the eye. it claimed him and trapped him against his will; the direction he was going was eye avatar, bcos that’s what he was aligned with, bcos that’s what got its hooks in him.

and, lbr he probably hated that just as much as he hated the stranger! becoming a full-on eye avatar would have been torture for him just as much as the stranger! because my original point was that tim would hate and at least try to reject any sort of avatar status at all. he might not succeed, but he’d try.

saying that tim could, theoretically, in an au, become so victimized by the stranger that he was pulled in unwillingly to be an avatar of something he hated? yes, obviously. technically, theoretically, anyone can be forcibly made into an avatar of anything (as tim himself points out; there are no rules, there’s nothing you can do to keep yourself safe, bad luck just happens bcos an entity decides yeah, that one, for funsies, might as well).

insisting that tim would be stranger and stranger alone bcos of his characterization (which like, saying that i don’t want to hear about tim’s characterization... come on. i love tim’s characterization. i’ve written essays about it.) or his storyline is dismissive of other ppl’s readings of the text and their own headcanons and aus, and also had absolutely nothing to do with my original post, which was saying that making tim or ANYONE an avatar of ANY entity is a tragedy more than it’s about ‘cool powers’ or even, to an extent, which entity you personally think they align with, and it’s more interesting and true to the text than not addressing that tragedy.

i do also disagree that tma is about the monsters that trauma makes of us. if that was the case, it would not be so fucking careful about how it portrays victims of trauma. not everyone with trauma in tma is a monster (georgie, for one; gerry; martin). not all of the monsters have trauma (elias... mostly elias. also simon). jon, forcibly made monstrous, refuses to become the monster those who made him want him to be; he sees what he is becoming and actively chooses to fight back.

tma is not a ‘monsters are good’ story (there are some stories that say ‘trauma makes us monsters and as monsters we are more human than those humans who hurt us’, which are pretty cool stories (mabel does this!), but not THIS story), it’s very firmly ‘monsters are bad’, and so to say that trauma makes people monstrous sets up a really really bad narrative that jonny has not done. jonny works so hard to be sensitive about trauma that this reading of tma actually actively upsets me.

imo, tma says true monstrousness is complicity in a monstrous system, and even those forced into the system can struggle against it while they try to survive it.

[horizonwalkers]

tiefling-queer replied to your post “it has come to my understanding that two of my favorite classes are...”

monks are only 'underpowered' because the idea of melee support (i mean, come ON! a monk is almost bound to go before heavy hitters, and can stunning strike, thus giving them advantage? when combined with other melee, it's a SOLID combo)

i’ve never thought about giving monks that description before and i think it fits perfectly! I’d also agree that Ranger to some degree falls into melee support with their limited casting and focus on ‘covering’ fire.

I really don’t get how monk is considered underpowered either. I’ve played a lot of monks and the only time I felt inadequate was when I played in a lvl 20 oneshot and I needed to be slingshot by my true polymorphed caster party into the air to beat dragons up in the sky on their backs because I couldn’t fly.  I’d say the only way monk really suffers is the same way that all martials do at high level dnd. 

[thecrownofflames]

7, 13, and 75?

#7 Battle Royale by Apashe x Panther

I'm the general, I could be worth somethin' My soldiers is ready to put a black hearse on 'em Bring 'em to the wake, recommend a requiem

#13 Desperado by Rihanna 

There ain't nothing here for me There ain't nothing here for me anymore But I don't wanna be alone

#75 Innocence by HEALTH

Shake hands with trauma Greet grief with a smile Bury this so ravenous And let it sleep for a while

[i-want-it-on-fire]

playlist: running along rooftops at midnight

Tiptoe - Imagine DragonsQuarter Past Midnight - BastilleReady To Go (Get Me Out Of My Mind) - Panic! At The DiscoLove Runs Out - OneRepublicWelcome To The Show - Britt NicoleShooting Arrows At The Sky - SantigoldSomething Good Can Work - Two Door Cinema ClubWest End Kids - New PoliticsHow It’s Going To Be - Gerard Way

Listen here

Send me a title and I’ll make you a playlist!

[seraphinial]

what do I sing?

BASICALLY every fob song I listen to, but more specifically Fall Out Boy's original song I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)

I picture a small venue but it's like packed, right, and you're there, with these big ass black boots, ripped up black skinny jeans, a sleeveless black denim battle jacket, and a sleeveless mothman graphic t, and you're just killing it, and on one of the choruses, you and your guitar player share a SUPER homoerotic moment where you're back to back, both doing your thing. The applause doesn't stop for like 5 whole minutes thank you for coming to my Ted Talk™

[actual-lea]

hear me out: Jessica as the third

GOOD

On a similar note, I remember way back in the unfiction days, finding a sort-of-theory-sort-of-AU big long post of “Amy as Hoody” that I started out reading as like a haha funny joke and ended up REALLY LOVING THE ENTIRE IDEA and I think about that every goddamn day

[grenadefestival]

i DO wanna know what wing's path entails, and who else is in this dating sim??

Game start, Wing is your antisocial neighbor across the hall who may as well be nocturnal, and what few friendship points you start with are there only because a post office error keeps causing you to receive each other’s mail, so you have to perform basic social niceties in order to swap the letters back. You’ll always have the option to flip through his mail before you go to give it back to him, which is really the only way to learn anything about him at the start. It can be tempting to try and bring up those things casually, and you can get away with some things without raising suspicion, but resist the urge. I have yet to find a path that doesn’t end in him figuring out that you’ve been going through his mail, which he will always be pissed about (especially if you’ve read any of the letters from his brother, that’s a big no.) The developers did put in a route where you can repair that broken trust and develop a friendship, but I have never seen this route end with you actually being able to date him. Save the mail-based conversations for when you’re trying to unlock Hag’s ending.

Instead what you need to do is - hear me out - fail the promotion quest. Now I know that sounds like the worst idea ever because the game seems to be implying that failing this quest will result in a game over, but it won’t. If you fail, you’ll get transferred to overnight shifts at your job, and you’ll realize that you and Wing have been working at the same store this entire time, but you never realized it because he’s on a completely opposite schedule from you. Now, being on overnights does severely limit your opportunities to interact with other characters (the coffee shop is always closed when you’re awake, for example, so it literally becomes impossible to further your relationships with either Burger or Ollie, or even meet them depending on how early in game this happens) so it does force you to commit to this path. But it also basically guarantees you’ll get Wing’s good ending because you’ll end up bonding over how fucking awful the overnight shift is no matter what. Literally the only way to fuck it up is to get him fired, and the paths that lead to that ending are easy to avoid if you use common sense.

So far we’ve talked exclusively about the hard-to-romance-sarcastic-asshole routes, but there are plenty of other ones that don’t require the use of a walk-through the entire time (though they’re certainly not without their own...unique challenges.) Cordelia is available for those who still want to romance a standoffish nerd. If you want to be gay and do crimes, Ollie and Maggie are easy to find, and for those who crave softbois, Burger and Wolfram are your best bets. There’s even DLC content for those who’ve already completed all the other routes and crave an even wider variety of niche weirdos to romance.