Agender (they/them/their). An adult. Astronomer. British. Bisexual. Christian. Feminist. LARPer. Writer. On AO3 as Triss_Hawkeye. Here you'll probably find a lot of fandoms, social justice, SPACE!, awesome music, and whatever else I happen to be into at the time. Nowadays there's a lot of C-dramas and video games. Sometimes I give a voice to Birds Rights Activism.
In the first Hades game by Supergiant, we play as Zagreus (male) and we are able to dash to avoid enemies attack.
In its sequel, Hades II, we play as Melinoe (female), Zagreus' sister, and we are now able to not only dash, but sprint by holding down the dash button, which allows us to gain new moves associated with sprinting.
In the first Hollow Knight game by Team Cherry, we play as an unnamed protagonist commonly referred to as the Knight (agender at creation) and we are able to dash to avoid enemies attack.
In its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, we play as Hornet (female), the Knight's sister, and we are now able to not only dash, but sprint by holding down the dash button, which allows us to gain new moves associated with sprinting.
From this we can infer 2 things:
Only women can sprint, everyone else can only dash
Sprinting may also be exclusive to sisters of their previous games' protagonist
I think, some days, of a post I saw on livejournal - if not before - that used a trick of paragraphs to fool you to thinking it was just a post, but sadly, you're already toast, for it's, in fact, a verse of hallelujah.
"rickrolling is mean" rickrolling is the gentle, kind, prosocial descendant of what we used to do on the internet, which was putting a redirect to goatse in every possible misspelling of a url
i completely understand & agree with the backlash against students using chatgpt to get degrees but some of you are out here saying "getting a degree in xyz means pulling multiple consecutive all-nighters and writing essays through debilitating migraines and having severe back pain from constantly studying at your desk and chugging energy drinks until you get a kidney stone and waking up wishing you were dead every day, and that's just part of the natural process of learning!!!" and like. umm. i don't think that any of us should have had to endure that either. like maybe the solution for stopping students from using anti-learning software depends on college institutions making the process of learning actually sustainable on the human body & mind rather than a grueling health-destroying soul-crushing endeavor
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Since we're all into Hadestown (again, if applicable) because of the proshot, here, have one of my Hadestown fics! This is an interactive fiction game where you play as Orpheus, trying to rescue Eurydice from Hadestown if you can just sing the right song. (Also, you're a butch lesbian, though I would say most of it still works for canon male Orpheus.)
odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I finally got the deeply underwhelming Mongolian inspired fantasy off my bedside table and picked up The Wolf And His King. I don’t know what I was expecting from the medieval gay werewolf book but it is a. Very medieval in tone but upfront about not being accurate in a way only a medievalist could be (“Brittany was a barony not a kingdom but it’s called a kingdom in the 12th century poem that inspired this so forgive me”) b. Has a very interesting PoV/chapter structure doing some fun stuff with tenses and so on and most importantly c. The handsome young king has met the scrungliest most pathetic wet man in existence and gone “god I want to climb him like a tree”
MONKEY'S PAW (a remake of a 2023 guan yu x cao cao comic)
[original]
i had always wanted to remake this comic esp w my new skills n i plan to publish a physical copy eventually (im just very eager to show it now that its done)
i especially wanted to explore more of cao cao's culpability which i didn't rly do in the original ehehe
homestuck enrichment ask; what character made YOU PERSONALLY go on an emotional arc the way your feelings changed about them throughout the work?
Had to chew on this one a bit since there's a few characters who took a bit to grow on me (c.f. aforementioned Dave, Karkat, also quite a few others of the trolls and the dancestors) but I think the character here is Roxy.
So when Roxy first turns up, she's very coloured by Rose's view of Mom which is in itself unreliable because Rose is thirteen and over-dramatic and believes Mom to be some sort of sadistic, manipulative figure determined to mock her at all times. And Roxy's an alcoholic like Mom was—not to say I don't like characters who are addicts, there are a lot of great characters who are or were—but at Roxy's introduction it was initially quite dismaying that this trait had carried over given that she's sixteen years old* and the main effect it seemed to have on her was making her a careless, annoying flirt and filling her logs with typos which for some reason hampered my ability to parse her dialogue even more than the typing quirks did (wonk). It did seem at first (seen from Jane's perspective) like her relationship with the version of Rose that is her mother was this sort of exaggerated parody version of the relationship that Rose had claimed to have with Mom, which wasn't really very appealing either.
*I grew up in a big drinking culture so the thought of a sixteen-year-old regularly drinking to the point of being addicted is not so much unusual to me as just... really sad and kinda depressing and not something I'm likely to find amusing.
With that said, once we get to Roxy's actual introduction there is an immediate light shone upon how unreliable a narrator Rose is—like, it's sort of obvious even at the beginning of Homestuck that she's making a big deal over a mother who's just trying to actively engage with her daughter and her interests, just maybe in a way that's missing the mark a bit, but it's really hammered home when you actually meet Roxy, like, this girl loves wizards! And her cat! Unironically! She's so full of love! And she's not a manipulative sadist about it—more just kinda clumsy in how she expresses it, in ways that aren't always appreciated by or helpful to other characters. And then not long after we find out that her living situation in the future is really nothing like we thought either, and she's also compensating for this horribly isolated situation she's in.
Her dealing with her alcoholism is again something that happens off-screen that I wish a bit of time would be spent examining, but I did like her and Rose's connection further down the line over their respective issues with addiction and how for both of them it was a failed attempt to connect with their mothers in a kind of mobius double reacharound of generational baggage which gets some closure with them being able to relate to each other as peers.
I also really liked her dynamic with Calliope, and her determination to make sure she gets the Ring of Life is genuinely the most selfless, pure-hearted thing. Roxy/Calliope 4eva. I think that combined with successfully un-voiding the Matriorb makes her one of a few characters who seem to complete and 'win' a personal arc, for want of a better way of putting it, in an endgame where not every character actually gets to that place, and sort of highlights that element of Homestuck's storytelling where it doesn't matter whether it's a narratively compelling moment for you or not—the end is upon you and you have to face it anyway.
Also, and this is less relevant to you but I'll mention it anyway, it's really cool to me that Roxy goes through two radically different (but imo fundamentally non-binary) gender journeys in the two epilogue routes, depending on the primary relationships and priorities in his/her life. It is very cool and fascinating and summed up to a degree by these quotes from the Candy timeline:
ROXY: so what
ROXY: tf do i care that theres some other reality out there some1 arbitrarily decided was the “real” one
ROXY: whats that have to do with the life i have now
ROXY: what is there actually that makes this one mean less than that one to the ppl who r actually in it
ROXY: i dont think i can regret anything
ROXY: theres not only one right way to be me imo
ROXY: i like the me i am
ROXY: its not like i went n decided “actually hell ya love to be a woman n do all the shit on the woman checklist”
ROXY: i get that thats prob what it looks like outside of my own self but i dont care abt that
Like one of the key things about Roxy in the epilogues is that due to him/her being a Rogue of Void, he/she is impenetrable to anyone who's narrating, and as a reader you only really get to understand what's going on with him/her when he/she speaks for him/herself or is centred in the narration. And it really illustrates the idea that the same character, under different circumstances, with different relationships and priorities, would make different decisions that are still harmonious with who they are (as a sort of complementary statement to the one Aranea makes in canon that I talked about a while ago).
Honestly every fuckin line Roxy has in Candy ch38 is a banger, she basically gets to declare the thesis statement of the epilogues which is that your stories don't need some canonical seal of approval to matter—canon is closed and this crazy fucked-up nonsense timeline matters as much as the '''''real''''' one so you get to decide what's real to you.
And she does it all somehow speaking out loud in txt spk which is very iconic of her and that's also something really grew on me (wonk)
So yeah my feelings on Roxy Lalonde have gone from ugh to actually I think Roxy might be right up there in favourite character spot now
