Maybe the Guardians just need a hug

https://twitter.com/Luffymaid

My “asking about one piece is illegal” policy is my rule so I get to choose when to allow it and decline to execute ppl for their crimes. I don’t think I’ve ever actually said anything about the Wano arc. Like I’ve gone this entire arc without saying a word about it. And that would mostly be because I haven’t been very impressed by it. Not gonna dive super deep into it, but it feels too sprawling. Massive cast, way too much time spent on side characters that I never got attached to. It’s had a handful of well loved fellow Supernovas there but barely made any use of them. It’s 50 chapters long already and we’re only just now getting to a flashback with a character who we’ve heard a lot about but that I feel 0 actual interest in. Wano’s been a place of interest for over 450 chapters. That’s a LOT of build up, and I’ve never felt that Momo or Kin’emon or Kanjuro or Raizo did a good job of interesting me or investing me in Wano in the preceding arcs. Ryuma’s zombie was awesome 450 chapters ago, and I feel like that connection has been underutilized. O-Kiku? Amazing and also underutilized. There are still good parts about it and I have no doubts that most fans are enjoying it plenty, but the arc hasn’t done anything to reignite any of the passion I used to have for OP. 

did u see that pluto anime teaser a while back?

Happy!

Two things to say here. One, I was concerned when I remembered that Zoe Quinns has already been a target of an intense online harassment campaign before. I’m not planning on diving into that. I’m an advocate of people both believing victims and people doing their own research before jumping to conclusions, but the one article I’ve looked at claiming to ~unravel~ the initial statements made by Zoe regarding Alec was a mile long and seemed like the webpage equivalent of a red string conspiracy theory board. 

Yes, I’ve read about the situation. I’m not going to try to summarize it here, so I’ll just provide this link. People who don’t know but want to can read more there and it’s highly recommended to read the posts by Scott Bensen, the lead writer and director of the game. 

Getting to it, “drama” doesn’t really do much to describe the situation. At least how I feel about it, “drama” is beauty vlougers on youtube making back to back callout videos that ultimately seem to be more about fighting for subscriber counts than anything else. The recent events involving Alec and his role in the NITW game and the lives of the people around him is something very far away from drama. It’s a situation of widespread abuse going back years that “ended” tragically, with the people involved making single statements they feel they owe to others and then stepping away from the public spotlight to continue processing both Alec’s death and the realization that what they personally went through had happened to so many other people without their realizing it. That’s not drama, that’s the reality of the life in the 21st century where creative types and their audiences feel connected to each other, which inherently involves the individual creatives becoming partially public figures who are expected to talk to their audience. Additionally, separate from that expectation, it’s also Scott and company’s right to be able to use their platforms to say, “I’ve heard something awful about my former team member, and this is how I feel about it and what I’ve been through myself.” 

As far as recommending the game goes, there are two basic perspectives that come to my mind. The first is cynical. It’s, “Sure Alec was minimally involved in the creative processes (aside from the music), but regardless of that and the work of the other team members, the success of NITW enabled an abusive person to gain more influence and hurt more people.” A simpler version of that take is as direct as, “A person who I would never want to support was involved in making NITW, so I do not want to support NITW.” However, the flip side of that is equally true. Even though NITW wouldn’t exist without Alec, Scott Benson went through veritable hell to create NITW because of Alec, and to decide to condemn the game is also to condemn all the hard work and passion of one of Alec’s victims. 

I have not played! I know it has rave reviews, and I am genuinely curious/tempted. My main issue is that I still don’t know how much I actually like Fire Emblem games. Do I like the characters? Absolutely. But do I like the gameplay itself? Uhhh not necessarily. I played Awakening and enjoyed it, but I tried playing Fates Conquest, got like 1/3rd? 1/2? of the way through the game and just dropped it and never finished it. That’s what I worry about with Three Houses. Strategy games that have huge, oversized maps stress me out because I’m a perfectionist and I get paralyzed by the prospect of messing up on something where it’s tricky to undo your mistakes. But at the same time doing something on too easy of a mode takes that challenge and fun out of it for me.

Another major problem for me with games like FE is that I have a hard time with games that have branching stories, time limited things to do, and where making some choices blocks off other parts of the game. I want to experience everything! Which is why games like BoTW are so essentially perfect for me--the game is set up to enable to you have the chance to do everything the game has to offer, and you can do it at your own pace in any order. It takes a massive amount of stress off my shoulders that I get burdened by when I play game that give you consequence based freedom where everything you do has the potential to bar you from doing/experience something else.