solved paradox

poll tournies, homestuck and short stories. Asks for opinion if you wanna hear me rant about film, books or curse of strahd because thats a major personality trait of mine now... if you want to talk more consistently, i have a discord server- https://discord.gg/8eTQ8m7bS7 where i Yap Very Consistently

[understandableparadox]

going to go insane and go out and woobify real people. but people i meet out on the street.

yeah, you- old man at the lowes, your lookin like a real smol heckin bean. you commited war crimes? thats real tragic, cant wait to commision fan art of you being coddled, what does your commanding officer look like and how big where his arms? you know what- never mind, leave that to the artist.

[jmfenner91]

I'm SO excited to finally share these pieces I created for D&D's Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.

This project was such a huge honor to work on. I remember as a kid looking through the players manuals & doing little studies of the artwork in there, so this feels a bit full-circle. You can get a peek at higher-res versions of them on my insta!

[understandableparadox]

tsundere equius calling gamzee a baka before they violently maul each other

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[understandableparadox]

anastrasya my beloved

art by @hareofhrair

so! time to talk about one of my favorite mid bosses, Anastrasya, the second youngest wife of the rock star of barovia- Strahd Von Zarovich (this is an 80s themed rewrite).

so, for the most basic info- she is based losely on flapper culture- and she has an emphasis on acting. her whole deal is that she is the greatest actor barovia has ever seen because she is its most hateful spectre- (thus why her apperance is based on shelia terry (glamoured) and Shelly duval (plain).)

when she was a child, her mother got her into acting- the very first play she ever attempted was a rendetion of lil orphan annie (fuck you i know the time line doesnt make sense if this is the 1920/30s, it works for her nickname)- but given her apperance- she got passed up- this sent her mother into histeronics but it made her fucking Hungry. she managed to convince the director to make her an understudy- she was ravenous to learn everything about entertainment- which allowed her to score a few small roles but never anything sustaining, especially as she got older and her looks started to solidify in her early 30s. roles dried up and she had to go on and take up a role in a burlesque version of caberet (yes i know, chai tea but this version has more tits and ass rocking about when your learning about escapism in a facist regime)- as the Emcee- Really just- pounding in those self image issues. it was in the downtime of her shows that she met a handsome stranger lurking in the shades- thus beginning a whirlwind romance between two high charisma, high acheiving sadistic psychos.

after being bitten- anyas powers begin to manifest as her being able to change based on the perception of those around her, then- as she began to get stronger- change others based on perception.

i fucking love her, she is one of the only wives that the group is Actually terrified of given her mind messing powers and how roundabout she is with her sadism, wanted to share with you her mug shots, she is available for line readings- but if you give her shit, she will make sure that you walk out of the room not remembering who you Are,.

(first image is anya Glamored and the second is her natural appearance)

[understandableparadox]

i could a hitched my fucking... awakening of self horse to so many respectable gay charecters, but no its the werid fucking ballet queer and the creep from black butler- and i cant even say i would go back and try to change it because im scared of how many dominos are stacked on this beloved freaks

[understandableparadox]

[understandableparadox]

i really do think characters like... bon clay or even grell from black butler are the reason im even openly out- which is evil because god damn it i should have picked more narrative satisfying queer role models that everyone can woke nod their head to.

unfortunately (lets be real, Luckily-) for me the thing that fucking kicked my brain into gear was seeing Bon clay manically doing everything they can to help a friend even if it was to the detriment to themselves, a manic, unhinged platonic Love so pure it bloomed in the depths of a Frozen hellhole that made me think- Fuck, I wanna be like them. The first step of which was to Be OK with some Facts about Myself

[understandableparadox]

[understandableparadox]

fuck it, Ask me anything about TTRPGS and how to run a game

[understandableparadox]

a lot of new dungeon masters questions boil down to either

"where do i look for games" and "how do i get my players to-"

the answer for the first is- if you want games with people you trust? Sucks to Suck bro-ham but you need to get that ball Rolling, you need to make the leap of faith and create the tradition of playing TTRPGS. sometimes you gotta shop around to see what they'll want to play because some of them wont want to play DND, some of them wont want to play a kids of bike game, you just gotta learn how to play a bunch of random systems or be ready to to Learn one Really quickly. if you are desperate enough then you just gotta cast the net in the dnd discords, "LFG" and the roll twenty websites public listings for games

you Look through the looking for players tabs and hope you find something thats up your ally and if not, be a good writer and hope you can make it a funny horror story for Me to read.

as for the second, there is no way for you to persuade your players. you can drop hints, you can point them to where they Should go but at some point there is going to be a moment whewre they hit you with a curve ball so severe that you will either have to Change the game- or Pause it and tell them that this is not going to Work for the Game that you are trying to run.

[understandableparadox]

hey im sorry im in a really verbose mood tonight so standby for me to yap

[understandableparadox]

i think any isekai that does not even attempt to have the mc grabble with the fact that they are Dead and they will never see the world they were born and raised in ever again- its value as art plummets to around the same level as a like- tube of silicone that you cut a slit in yourself and fuck. i cant even say a flesh light because at the very least someone had to Model it.

its a mindless indulgence that is either Spit or Lust driven that has no interest in exploring anything but a truly and mindbogglingly myopic story in which Guy Get Strong and Fuck Girl.

its also within that space that I feel comfertable that their is no story to be Found. the story is contained within maybe the first 4 to 5 chapters. you will learn everything about the story, you will learn everything about its story beats and you will learn how every female charecter and antagonist will be treated. you will never have to read another chapter of it again because you can remember those first 4 to 5 chapters and known instinctively how that arc will resolve.

at first i was under this delusion that isekai was a fundamentally lonely genra- i no longer beleive that because even that has been subsumed by a deluge of slop so abhorrent that i cant even bother to reach into the barrel to make comedic reviews because they will be so mindnumbingly similier to each other that the only differance will be which author is drawing whatever mound of fat to bounce in my face or whatever cocky blonde man thats about to die because they lack some Deeply fundamental ability to communicate.

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[purseownervolatile]

I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?

Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??

[lexiiii-vt]

Like this, mostly.

[tonights-episode]

[doubleca5t]

The boobs thing is arguably even funnier

[lexiiii-vt]

I have an important update to this saga:

In chapter 299, the main character unleashes a special attack (???), and immediately after, her boobs DEFLATE BACK DOWN TO A REASONABLE SIZE

And then later in the match, she has to use another special move

And now she's completely flat-chested

In Saki, magical mahjongg power is literally stored in the boobs, which in my opinion is the best possible explanation for all this.

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

Important updates!!!

[realfroghoursninetofive]

New science from the saki panties and boobs post

[ingridverse]

[understandableparadox]

i get it- i fucking get it- the author has drawn so much smut that They Themselves are no longer actually intrested in their own fetishes- but instead how to work the fetish into the stories

this is the same shit as post irony but for Long running Smut mangas about board games- this is post fan service- the point in which the fan service is no longer appealing to the fans thus the fan service itself must be inverted in order to keep intrest- NOT ONLY for the reader but for the author themselves. the breasts have to have a pay off aside from their jiggling- and we are Allowed to bask in that madness-

this is in and of itself a subversion of the smut arms race mirrored by shounen power scaleing- in which a erotic series will be forced to find New tit(hehe)iliating scenarios that push its own boundries in order to keep the premise fresh- instead of finding more lewd things for the body to do, they have found a way to incorperate the Fetish into the story inself.

i am SO deeply and completely unintrested in anything mahjong but by god i may have to read it from start to finish to understand where it goes next- will her breasts swell back to their prior size? is there some sort of training that she must undergo? if they Dont, will she inevitably be forced to sacrifice something else? will her panties spontaniously reapper? is the cost of power the removal from absurditiy? probability bent means relevence surrendered? What does it mean???

[fairycosmos]

you literally have to unironically listen to some shit like party rock anthem so you don’t kill yourself

[k1aida]

Gamzee as Jimi Hendrix :P

[understandableparadox]

i think a good way to train yourself is to go on craigslist and look at posts to see if you can find which one is a local scam or not.

[understandableparadox]

saw art of a down right beautiful man and was haunted to learn that they are trapped in the game of eternal evil and doom