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Fantasy setting with magic neatly organised into elemental spheres, except each magic-using culture disagrees with all the others about what the primordial elements are, what their associations and correspondences are, and even how many of them there are. Spells always interact with other spells from the same magic system as though its elemental theory is complete, consistent, and correct, but when spells from two different magic systems come into contact it all goes a bit sideways, often in ways that require flowcharts to explain. Like, you think Ground Type vs. Rock Type is bad? There are five separate, mutually exclusive spheres of magic all called "Fire". The Sylvan Confederacy's "Water" magic explodes on contact with the Empire of the Five Pillars' "Water" magic and nobody knows why.

Addendum: we are explicitly not allowed to make this into one of those "reality is secretly determined via mass consensus and each culture's magic only works that way because they foolishly believe it does" deals. That's been done to death, and having a secret unified theory that tidily explains everything but only the super special protagonists are allowed to know about is frankly trite. We can do better!

Sorry boss. Best I can do is "There is in fact a super secret unified theory, but it's secret for some GOOD FUCKING REASONS, including but not necessarily limited to, practitioners having a greatly elevated risk of exploding into demons like the Psykers from WH40k, which makes it exclusive domain of the antagonists rather than the protagonists".

Let’s see what the old Steam recommendation queue thinks it’s going to sell me today.

I swear to god this is not the first time I’ve encountered this concept. There was one where the aspects were “Horny” and “Viking”, and another, significantly more interesting one where the aspects were “Anything that involves inflicting physical violence on a person or object” and “Anything not covered by the previous”, with the additional caveat that your character’s number would move in the direction of being better at violence as they got increasingly pissed off over things. Another reason this second one was the more interesting of the two was that your number would be represented by sticks of bubblegum, and when it hit zero, your character was, officially, drumroll please... All Outta Bubblegum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du5YK5FnyF4&ab_channel=Movieclips

like the thing with senator armstrong that makes him so iconic and dare i say realistic even though he only has like one scene and spends it throwing cars at a cyborg ninja is that he correctly identified the symptoms - modern media and consumerist culture is geared towards providing an endless stream of bullshit that doesn’t matter in order to distract the masses and keep them complacent - but because he never actually struggled a day in his life he’s completely wrong about what it’s a symptom of, and therefore, what the solution is. everyone is fucking sick of late stage capitalism! it’s not meant to actually benefit anything other than the line that shows the profits going up and even this guy at the top of the food chain thinks its a load of shit. armstrong and raiden actually agree on that part. but raiden is the saddest wettest most pathetic poor little meow meow who suffered every possible crime against humanity as well as being forced to perpetuate those crimes himself so he correctly identifies that the media spectacle is meant to distract from the blood of the weak that oils the machines while armstrong thinks it’s meant to distract the strong from the fact that they could totally kill people with their bare hands and only pussies rely on the machine to squeeze the blood out of the weak. which makes him fucking insane! and at the same time an incredibly real portrayal of the way upper class white men feel alienated by the system built from the ground up to benefit them and radicalise into being batshit insane precisely because the system has always benefited them but they’re still unsatisfied so instead of continuing to adhere to the rules of this alienating society they think the world should just be a complete free for all in which they’ll surely still come out on top. and even though he absolutely and undeniably is a villain, when he’s screaming “fuck the internet fuck the 24/7 stream of internet celebrity bullshit fuck all of this” you still wanna scream it with him because we all hate it here

Jesus fucking Christ why does this make so much sense

I have literally never posted on tumblr before but I absolutely need to comment on this. From the Dark Matter Trilogy onwards, our pink puffball has, with disturbing regularity, thrown down with planet killing abominations and come out on top. Kirby: Star Allies in particular implies that the reason Kirby is able to do this (and the reason Kirby is Like That just in general) is that our gluttonous friend is in fact an infant version of SOMETHING with similarly cataclysmic potential. Dedede, meanwhile, is literally some guy from planet Popstar. That’s it. No hidden legacy, no secret power. Just some dude, who has been training his ass off to try and keep up with his friend/rival. Who, as previously mentioned, may or may not be a round, pink, eldritch abomination. The fact that Dedede is strong enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Kirby is a spectacular accomplishment, and his royal majesty’s theme song can go as hard as it damn well pleases.