what do you put here...meow

teo. he/they. 23. guy who really likes deja vu by deukae and a couple other things

[blurry-foxes]

@teo-meow , @madara-keter-class and I have been playing blue prince for HALF A YEAR. And we just finished. This has been more than a game. Tbh it's been more like an experience. If you like puzzles and spending time with your equally insane puzzle liker friends, PLEASE give this game a shot (do keep in mind still. This game is not for everyone. It requires very certain wires to connect in your brain for this game to scratch it the way it did for us.)

This was our situation tonight because we knew the end was coming. I need to have my memories removed so I can experience this game for the first time again.

Below is a picture of us three figuring out the last puzzle. If you want to give the game a go, don't look, or do, but definitely don't look too close ig. Leaving this here more for the people that are curious about it and want to look into our sick and twisted minds (it's genuinely insane looking)

The atelier puzzle 🚬🚬🚬🚬

[foone]

Blue Prince needs a mode where the sun explodes 22 minutes into each day.

[arithetonberry]

Kind of a weird time for this maybe but I made a comic essay about the video game Blue Prince and my experience playing it. Very, very good game.

There's no spoilers for puzzles or lore btw

[madara-keter-class]

she blues on my prints till I draft

[madara-keter-class]

she blues on my prints till I draft

[hog-zone]

his slutty lil pose... he sickens me

[keflibunni]

commission for @softcalico! 💕

[tsukinoshinjiu]

I think everyone here should watch Gnosia

[spilledte]

Setsu suit pt 1

[meowmeowsabortionclinic]

It's kind of a shame LN5 gets so much focus on its later chapters, because Maomao's state of mind in the first part is chilling and intriguing.

All alone, no palace friends to balance her out, Luomen's compassionate influence gone, Maomao ends up back in her office at the Verdigris House and comfortably finds herself just-above-bottom class. For the first time since coming "home," she actually has a little power and security. But poverty hovers around her.

And she is soberingly pragmatic about it. Even to the point of cruelty against kids who really aren't doing anything more than being "annoying" to her, like Chou-u and Zulin's Sister.

I think a lot of people feel suffering should make you a better person, even if they say they don't believe that. What they DO say is; "If you've been in poverty, you should know how bad it is!" or "As a survivor of abuse, they ought to know how terrible it feels!"

But that's not really how trauma works. It's healing and finding support networks that teach you how to be better than what was done to you-- things that Maomao really does not have at this moment.

And to make it worse, I think it's clear she's struggling with bereavement. She believes Shisui/Tamamo is dead. She is not introspective enough to identify her feelings and grieve, though.

So... she takes out her turmoil on the people she CAN, justifying her cruelty to herself as "a hard dose of reality."

It's more than just how she responds to Chou-u when he's angry the Madame is putting a tax on his art business; it's how she's quietly triumphant when Chou-u is shocked to tears by the syphilitic sex worker outside the window.

It's more than the way she's angry at Sazen for petty thievery and selling a priceless book; it's how she doesn't care at all about the way a man who helped her twice is filthy and emaciated, launching into leveraging blackmail about his identity to find the book before Ukyou suggests giving him a meal.

It's more than the way she removes Zulin from her abusive home when her drunkard father can't pay; it's putting her sister into medical debt by letting her believe she would have forced that kid into the Verdigris House.

(And that's me being charitable. I don't think Maomao would have followed through on that-- but Zulin's Sister didn't know that. Assuming that this isn't one of Kevin's translation errors, ofc.)

LN5's early chapters feel like a glimpse of a world where Maomao could become like the Madame; bitter and miserly. It even seems like the Web Novels are pointing at the idea that this period in Maomao's life might have created consequences she'll be regretting soon.

[augustinamiaumiau]

I always thought the beginning of volume 5 was meant to contrast with the first four volumes, where Maomao was not exactly at the bottom of the food chain in the Rear Palace, but definitely not close to the top either. In the Pleasure District, however, she is at the top. She is an independent, educated woman who runs her own shop under the protection of the Verdigris House. When she goes out, Ukyou, the Vedigris bodyguard, is always by her side.

She never had to prostitute herself or be forced to find a husband, and she can go anywhere she pleases, while the majority of women in the neighborhood are trapped there unless a man buys them, including her sisters.

Volume 13 spoilers

This is why Joka reflects that, while she could never truly be jealous of Maomao, she often thinks about what her life might have been like if she had her own Luomen to protect and educate her.

„But Joka and Maomao could not have been on more different paths in life. Each had a courtesan for a mother, but Joka had chosen the path of the courtesan herself, whereas Maomao had taken the way of the apothecary. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Joka had had no other choice but the courtesan’s path, whereas for Maomao another possibility had been available. If Joka had had someone who could have been to her what Luomen was to Maomao, would her life have been different?”

In other words, in the Pleasure District, Maomao is quite privileged, which can sometimes make her seem tone-deaf to the suffering of others.

[meowmeowsabortionclinic]

YES to all of this, and

You could consider the opening of LN5 as a contrast to her position in LN1 - 4, but I'm using a lens to consider it as more of a continuation of it. It's an emotional regression brought on by loss.

The Rear Palace and the Pleasure District are very much alike. They're bubbles of safety (or, cages) in two dangerous environments, at either end of class extremes.

While Maomao's time in the Rear Palace is practically defined by her solidarity with others (going out of her way to warn about the powder, allowing Fengming to bring her secret to the grave, the ice cream, even the fact she was NOT going to expose Shenlu so the clinic wouldn't close down), she's almost malicious in how hard she brings the hammer down on the people she has power over in the Pleasure District.

It's less like tone-deafness, and more... purposeful. Her intention isn't specifically to hurt Sazen, Zulin's Sister, or Chou-u, but it is to knock them down.

Bullies don't see themselves as bullies, y'know? Parents, teachers, peers, anyone can do it.

For Chou-u, she's annoyed and resentful. She doesn't like kids at this point of her life, doesn't like having one foisted on her, and she doesn't like this loud little shit who doesn't "know his place." She probably sees her behavior as humbling him, or teaching him "hard lessons."

For Zulin's Sister, she's disdainful of being pushed into the same impoverished position as Luomen. She's decided to be rigid about this; a contract is a contract and she wants her damn money, no matter who you are. She even decides she respects the sister's choice to become a courtesan and "survive" the abusive house she comes from-- not seeing herself as part of the equation that is forcing a kid into sex work.

And Sazen, it's like righteousness in her eyes. Their shared history is just leverage she can use to get what she wants; right now, this is a petty thief who sold off a priceless book, and she treats him like scum until Ukyou intervenes. He is the one to suggest that selling off the encyclopedia was probably a matter of life or death, encouraging Maomao to remember that compassion can be helpful for achieving your goals.

(This might actually be where Maomao's character arc about "what is good vs what is legal" begins, thinking about it.)

For all its restrictions, the Rear Palace was actually the first time Maomao had a proper social group. Not just her family, but friends, supervisors, acquaintances. She had to be some amount of friendly towards others, so she made genuine connections that helped her grow.

So it kind of makes sense just HOW hard she snapped back into ruthless apathy after losing her friends, social environment, and palace job all at the same time. AND also thinking Shisui is dead.

[sdra054]

old thing I reworked and had fun with :]

[teo-meow]

I'm so normal about clea dessendre

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. martha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1989. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[motsimages]

Seconding from Spain, where the first pride was organised after the US pride, following the US idea. Yes, there were trans women, but they weren't black because there is very little black population in Spain in general, and in the 1970s in particular.

There are trans Roma women (for an equally marginalised and forgotten collective), and there are some local LGBT icons, but many people know better about the US pride originators than our own (including myself) because it is retold year after year as a universal experience.

And we don't even share the language! Many people do not even speak English and still know who Martha P. Johnson is. Not even articles in gay magazines will give the name of the people who organised or participated in the first gay parade in Spain in 1977 (8 years after Stonewall, because fascist dictatorship).

One of the biggest events in terms of LGBT celebration is Los Palomos, in Badajoz, and it takes place from the end of May to the beginning of June. And it takes place in one of the most rural areas of Spain.

I found this very interesting list of LGBT chronology of Spain, as a starter to know our history better.

It has been writing this and reading that list that I found about an event that some people want to claim as our own pride and it took place in january **1933**: La marcha de las Carolinas, when a group of transvestites marched towards a public men's restroom that had been bombarded during some anarchist riots. First time I heard of it and all it took was a 5 minute search online in my native language.

[freyalise]

for those who come after [fails to parry every strike in a five hit combo and dies badly]

[cloudyydraws]

wind up doll

[limitiz-nk]

Fantômes

The pale moonlight streams through the forest and falls upon the sorrowful grave. The grave is a cage.

A white specter dances a deathly dance, and gloomy laughter echoes within the long skirt.

No, that's not the white - haired woman you're seeking. That's a forgotten shadow. The delicate red rose in her hand has long withered. Torn apart by hatred and love, she is merely an unnamed ghost.

[awetfrog]

the autism has won