Idk man I'm tired

In the same way the series will play episodes of ha-ha spy themed hijinks and antics and will then turn around and look you dead in the eye and say with no humor whatsoever "war is a hell that degrades bodies and spirits of everyone it touches," they will play many episodes of happy home life and teasing tension between the ML and FL and then hit you with "amatonormativity is a tool of the fascist state, actually."

The entire reason this household comes to exist in the first place is that neither Loid nor Yor can exist freely in Ostanian society without checking all the socially expected boxes of being in a married heterosexual relationship with child. The ways that the authoritative Ostanian state demands this conformity, this biological labor, are markers of its oppressiveness as much as their paranoia and their secret police. Yor in particular was drawing so much hostility and suspicion from her coworkers just for being a single woman in her twenties that they were on the verge of reporting her for subversive behavior until she casually mentioned that she had met someone and was getting married soon.

Marriage and parenthood are, explicitly, the camouflage and cover that allow Yor and Loid to continue living their lives unimpeded, as they could never do openly. Having established that unequivocally, this unconventional household -- parenthood without biology, partnership without sex -- continues to be a successful place of stability and happiness for all three of them, despite lacking the elements that their amatonormative society insists are non-negotiable.

to self-soothe and self-educate (through media consumption)

to protect the people around it

and this protagonist, who deescalates violence at every opportunity, who takes a thousand personal injustices in stride and only strives to do better, whose first-and-worst-and-most-brilliant act of self-reclamation—literally reclaiming its mind—was fuelled not by its need for freedom but by a desperation to never be forced to hurt anyone against its will ever again.

avoid the big fish in this pond. do not seek to become one. avoid the fandom aunts, the "big name fans", the One Discord Server.

consider that how someone treats the people they despise and whether you're brave enough to disagree with them, should they turn that conduct on you. and if it requires a significant amount of bravery to think about telling them they've been a bastard, you may want to reconsider being in that relationship.

there will be people on here who will suicide bait you for being happy. they are very sad people and it is not your job nor your responsibility to engage with them. it's up to them to decide to do differently.

try to decouple your sense of self-worth from metrics. the number can never go up enough. i have a project that's >90% positive feedback and over 200,000 downloads and that does nothing for me on my day to day. it's nice if other people like the thing, but it's worth examining why you're creating and sharing in the first place and figuring out what you actually want.

do not treat the dsm like a holy text that must never be questioned

do not go in on sexual or gender identity based taxonomics

do not be cruel to people you deem lesser than you

I want more people to play Pokémon Masters EX so here's my pitches:

You know how the human Pokémon characters don't get enough focus even though there's so much effort put into the designs of every one? Well in PMEX you don't just collect Pokémon, you recruit "sync pairs" which is one human and one Pokémon each. Most of the focus is on those human Trainers.

You can keep some of them in the Trainer Lodge and take them out on dates.¹ Oh and you can decorate with plushies and posters.

There are one-on-one events with each character too, even ones not in the Lodge. They call them "sync pair stories" and a lot of people have more than one for if you get alt outfits of them.

The battle system is pretty interesting IMO; each sync pair has four "moves" which are some combination of Pokémon moves (usually the same ones you see in the games, sometimes adjusted for PMEX mechanics) and Trainer moves, which can be things like using items or nebulous actions named things like "Time to Energize!" or "World of Pain!" that have their own unique effects. Then there are limit breaks called Sync Moves that are implied to be a combined effort between the Trainer and the Pokémon. They've also got their own passive abilities that change the way certain mechanics work. I think it's a cool conceptualization of Pokémon battles and it's closer to something you'd see in the anime or manga that plays a little loosely with the way the game mechanics normally work. Like yes, Nemona can sweep with an unevolving Quaxly and her Hydro Pump hits all enemies. Why? 'Cause she's Nemona, and she's cracked at Pokémon battles! Volo's Togepi knows a modified version of Metronome called "Masterful Metronome" that only selects from a small pool of powerful moves. Why? Because this is a game where a particularly skilled Trainer--and/or a particularly skilled Togepi--can refine their Metronome skills to that degree!

The costumes go crazy. If you were tempted to play UNITE for the holowear, you'll definitely be tempted by this. Some of them are Trainers cosplaying their Pokémon, some are event-themed like holiday outfits, and some are just fun.

Mostly used title art and the posters you can get for the Lodge/loading screens for these because they show off more outfits at a time and some of the Pokémon as well. Oh btw

You can buy (with in-game currency) some beautiful artworks and not only put them up in some places in the Lodge, but also set as many of them as you like to rotate between on the loading screen. It's a cool way to see them regularly even when you don't have enough physical space to place them around.

Remember Team Rainbow Rocket, in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon? And how that version of Giovanni just kind of mysteriously fucks off afterward? Well he ends up in this game. And he's one of the main characters. And he's so so fun I love him in PoMas.

There's no shortage of insignificant-yet-wacky interactions. Cyrus makes friends with Sophocles. Liza (of Tate and Liza fame) gets sucked into a wormhole. Whitney meets a Ditto impersonating her and momentarily gets starstruck because she's such a big fan of Whitney. The main justification for Trainers and legendaries and such ending up on Pasio is that there's a Hoopa who just loves wreaking havoc with portals for no reason. The owner of the island, Lear (oh by the way Pasio is an artificial island and this guy made it, dw about it), has a pet Hoopa and it's a massive asshole.

Lear is very fun. He's this entitled rich short guy who's a literal prince but decided to build his own island to be king of?? He cackles all the time. He made a gold statue of himself and gave it away as a contest prize. You can bring your Trainer Lodge dates to his house for some reason.

Lear's retainers, Rachel and Sawyer, are not as developed as he is but the whole dynamic they have going on is incredible. They're like doting parents towards Lear no matter how douchey he is. They're so unserious too, like they kind of have a uniform but Rachel's has huge floppy sleeves and Sawyer's is tailored to every millimetre of his muscles. These are the personal handlers of a prince/king. Look at this happy family.

The gacha is fairly generous and free-to-play friendly compared to a lot of gacha games I play. There are no sync pairs that you can only ever buy with real money, and the vast majority of paid banners run alongside free ones. (e.g. right now there is a regular scout for Rei (Academy) which accepts free gems, and then the banner next to that is a tiered scout for Rei (Academy) that only takes paid gems.) The few times when the pair you want is on a paid-only banner, there will be another time to acquire it for free. Take it from a consummate gacha player: keep track of how much total money you've spent on each game, and ONLY give a game the amount you think it has earned. A game might get $20 out of me if I play and enjoy it for three years. If I've played it for a week, it might get a dollar; even then I'm still going to be in the skeptical stage. But I want to give the amount where if the game is shut down forever or I quit playing permanently, I don't feel that I've wasted my money. I feel that I've paid fairly for the experience that I got to have.

They made Ball Guy nonbinary.