eternal damnation

imagine they use the greying ritual on The Darkest Faerie and try to rehabilitate her and she's like "fuck you I hate all of you I hope you all DIE! ...wait.. I think I know who I'm supposed to be {:o..." And she reforms into the void faerie and gets Worse

I really like motherhood as a character trait and symbol in fiction because it's a position of power afforded to women that's both aligned with and central to their gender role rather than being contrary to it, and it can reveal a lot about how a character reacts to being given almost total control, heavy responsibilities, and very little external accountability or support, which I think is a very rich scenario and character type to explore. in my mind the role of mother is closer to captain than to wife. but, unfortunately for me, there is the rest of the world to contend with, and most other people are trying to be Normal about motherhood rather than Weird about it on purpose.

i was talking about this on my server earlier but i really think "cozy" is one of the worst genre labels out there in the gaming space. like people dunk on the terms "metroidvania" and "first person shooter" a lot for being uncreative or limiting but at least those are like... falsifiable descriptors. you can look at a game and go "yeah this game's mechanics and core gameplay loop generally operate like metroid/castlevania" or "yeah this game primarily uses a first person camera paired with some sort of projectile weapon" so i don't think they're completely useless. but "cozy" is just nonsense. fully subjective. i see a lot of games popularly labeled as "cozy" that share almost zero mechanical features between them and don't even always match in tone or aesthetic. hearing a game described as "cozy" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect as a player beyond maybe giving you a sort of forewarning about the fanbase and their discomfort tolerance. "cozy" is not a quantifiable metric. like imagine if someone offered to buy you takeout and asked you what kind of food you'd like and you told them fully unironically, and with no further elaboration, "i want to get yummy food." that's what hearing "cozy games" sounds like to me

i especially chafe at the way "cozy games" just seems like a "woke" way to say "girl games" and conflate certain game mechanics or aesthetics with a non-cis/het/male identity (to equally useless effect from a buyer's pov). gender stereotyping by any other name is still gender stereotyping. i'm not cis het or male, but i've spent decades enjoying pvp shooters and feel bored to tears by cutesy cottagecore farming sims. and i find those pvp shooters very "cozy" to play, too! @_@;

The funniest thing to me about Chen's character is his need for chaos in his life. At an outside glance you wouldn't think it from the former military man turned Marshal for the Rangers who came from a strict family but you couldn't be farther from the truth. His best friend is Ortega, he adopts a hyper fast noodle dog, despite his own self awareness of his romantic history he can still fall for the villain. It's funny because the taciturn, calculating and logical part of him is true but the fuck it lets see what happens part of him is also true. Wei Chen the man that you are.