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Monterey Bay Aquarium

ellievsbear

roma★
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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tannertan36
tumblr dot com
we're not kids anymore.
Claire Keane
ojovivo
Jules of Nature
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
taylor price
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Origami Around
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap
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@grumblesaur
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I think what a new Golden Sun game would really need in terms of mechanical design is better dungeon revisits. The best you usually get when backtracking to a previous location is a bit of treasure or an optional Psynergy. There's a cliff on the outer portion of Air's Rock that offers you a chest if you can cast Frost, and it's possible you'll complete Air's Rock before Piers joins the party, so this necessitates a backtrack in that case.
Vale offers the Vale Cave behind Kraden's house if you have obtained the Lift Psynergy. This earns you the Halt Gem and Kite, the former of which is needed to complete certain optional puzzles, but has no effect on the critical path. Put differently, most of the backtracking in this series is of a "hey, do you remember that one chest you couldn't get to in that dungeon from five hours ago?" nature, and it's especially disappointing when your other explorations or blacksmith trips have earned you equipment that surpasses the optional treasure anyway. Coins are nice in the early game, but the player's earning potential scales much faster than the game offers money sinks to absorb it, so getting a boost of a few thousand coins from some junk sword isn't all that appealing.
The Lost Age's Shrine of the Sea God is actually the best example of backtracking in the game. On your first visit, you're there to rescue a couple of missing kids from Daila. If you visit Shrine of the Sea God before the Kandorean Temple, you'll find that you can't rescue the boys without something to help with the rope. The Kandorean Temple provides Lash, using which one can rescue the boys and reach a Jupiter Djinni deeper in the cave, but no further progress can be made.
Later, Piers's presence in the party unlocks the second half of Shrine of the Sea God, allowing the player to obtain the first of three prongs of the Trident of Ankohl. This dungeon, despite being among the simplest in the entire series, serves multiple purposes. It even shows us non-antagonist NPCs interacting with it.
A future Golden Sun game needs more dungeons like Shrine of the Sea God, where the need to revisit is developed naturally by the story, or where the exploration of a previously inaccessible area does something to extend the story, rather than simply offering a minor sidequest for some loot.
This Psynergy-based gating could also be made more interesting. It's rare that a puzzle will use more than two kinds of Psynergy, and what objects are allowed to be affected by a particular kind of Psynergy is usually pretty arbitrary. You can Move rectangular boxes, tall stone pillars, or the occasional stump, but you can't move a Frost pillar that's roughly the same size and shape as the stone pillars. You can freeze a puddle into a column of ice, but you can't conjure an ice stepping stone in a pool of water. You can tunnel through sand, but you can't Grind stone into sand to tunnel through. The puzzles start to get pretty samey in the latter portions of each game, where the only complexity is how many times you have to cast the spell. In a normal playthrough where you're leveling up regularly from random encounters, running out of Psynergy is almost never an issue, so choices in combat have no material consequences on one's ability to complete a dungeon.
Let's try something better. A common motif in Golden Sun puzzle design is redirecting the flow of something—water or fire in Mercury and Mars Lighthouse pipes, the Psynergy channels in the Great Gabomba and Venus Lighthouse, etc. I discussed an exploration-oriented Golden Sun 4 where the party would be tasked with learning about the changes to the landscape and what was unearthed in the process. Dark Dawn has its Alchemy Machines (Forge, Well, Dynamo) linked, but each is an altogether separate dungeon. For this hypothetical Golden Sun 4, I imagine a massive Alchemy Machine as sort of the centerpiece for this exploration, where it has interlocking sections and requires a variety of Psynergy to fully turn on, but individual sections must be started in order to observe them or access an area beyond them.
We'll call this the Alchemy Engine, specifically because engines need a bit of help getting started, but are subsequently able to operate continuously. Imagine, in one portion of this dungeon, a room with channels in the floor that lead to different ledges, over which some fluid should fall and turn wheels below, each of which operate different things. If we're imagining this with Nowell and Takeru as our starter Pokémon, Nowell could cast Douse on one of the wheels to get it to do something useful, like raise a piston out of the floor to hop across.
On the wall opposite the cascade points to the water wheels, there is a sealed area. Someone with an explosive Psynergy could blow it open, but Nowell and Takeru lack this ability. They can operate the wheels a little bit, one at a time. Perhaps with the backing of more Djinn could Nowell produce more water with Douse and turn all the wheels from the channels in the floor, but there still remains the limit of her Psynergy reserves. This is, after all, an engine, and engines only really do their thing when they're able to be operated continuously.
Later on, though, they join forces with a Mars Adept who can cast Burst, and they blow the wall open, and water flows out, filling all the channels and thereby turning all the wheels. This part of the engine now gets to do something it couldn't before, and if the party needs to stop the engine, the water can be stopped again with Frost. Perhaps it would even be possible to stop one of the channels with ice, but leave the others freely flowing, providing a means to switch the engine between eight (2³) different states.
Furthermore, all of this can be made more challenging by requiring minimum amounts of Psynergy to perform certain tasks, and by only expanding characters' Psynergy pools through Djinn or items, rather than a steady trickle for each level gained. A dungeon crawl becomes a resource management challenge as well, akin to Persona 5's Mementos delving, where restorative items and SP are hard to replenish on the go. You can leave and come back, but you may not get the opportunity to return for some time.
This is less of the "square key goes in the square keyhole" design of existing Golden Sun games and more about interacting attentively with the environment. This kind of innovation would be necessary for carrying on the series.
warmed up with a pic of mercedes since it's her bday :3c
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I am a bit surprised how the discussion about Margrave Edmund begins and ends at how he was a commoner who bought his seat on the roundtable. The thing is, that is an in-universe statement that ignores the elephant in the room; Marianne. Is it not convenient that the one commoner who is allowed to hold a title and sit amongst the nobility just so happened to choose his adopted daughter, who just so happens to have a rare crest, to be his heir. The only seat filled in by a commoner will be filled in by a socially acceptable noblewoman the moment the commoner dies. This, somehow, had no bearing on the decision to elevate the commoner in question.
It is also probably the big reason why Marianne has so much social anxiety around her crest and gets a bit testy around the topic of her adoptive father. I do think Margrave Edmund loves her, but there is a poison in the relationship; the Margrave initally adopted Marianne into his family because she was a ticket to more power and influence. That transactional aspect to their relationship looms over the two of them.
i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that will companies are still trying to stomp out.

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You ever think in the timelines where Manuela teaches the Golden Deer because Byleth picked one of the other two, Judith visits to check on Claude and a Category 10 Thirsting And Starved Saphhic Incident transpires?
See, in my mind, what makes this so funny is that I choose to believe Judith is still holding a doomed candle for Tiana. I want the punchline being that Manuela has no chance because Judith already has enough heartache to drown her over a woman she has not seen for at least seventeen years.
Every time you refer to a character as "the older man" or "the blonde" or "the green-eyed woman" or with any other epithet when their name is known to the reader and the POV character, an angel loses their wings, a puppy dies of cancer, and my hope for humanity erodes just a tiny bit more.
Just use a name.
If you have some kind of itch to avoid repeating a lemma in the span of a page or paragraph, it's time to get over it. At best, switching to an epithet erodes the reader's familiarity with the character. At worst, it sounds like you've suddenly introduced a new character. Unless you have a clear reason to erode that familiarity (e.g. your POV character is suffering from amnesia or some other psychological/neurological condition), just use names. Please. I am begging you.
And no, it's not repetitive. Names are as transparent as pronouns, articles, and conjunctions once their referents have been introduced in the discourse of a story.
I can understand the urge to use such constructions in situations where multiple characters use the same pronoun set. Using an epithet instead of a pronoun removes this ambiguity, but so does using a name, and it's a lot less clunky. If you're really worried that your paragraph's tangle of overloaded pronouns is too difficult to parse (because it probably is), use this strategy:
Make one character's actions the focus of a particular paragraph and use their name in the first sentence. All further references to that character in that paragraph use the appropriate pronoun. The remaining characters always use their name. Break to a new paragraph when you want to focus on someone else.
(Note: the subject of a clause/sentence/paragraph is not necessarily the POV character, and you can shift the focus of the narrative while still filtering through your POV character's perceptions. This is not an instruction to start head-hopping.)
This goes for plain old nouns too! If you're writing "orbs" instead of "eyes" to avoid sounding "repetitive", just think that your readers will be imagining glowing video game powerups embedded in the character's eye sockets, which is probably not what you want!
Just. Use. A Name.
it's a little pet peeve of mine and there's nothing to prove or disprove it in canon, but i'm not a fan of when anselma is illustrated with edelgard's natural hair color. i always assumed edelgard's natural hair was closer to ionius's hair and anselma would look more like............. her biological brother.......
I don't think I ever posted this Hapistance commission on its own here. I still love this one.
Additional version under cut:

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diamond dust
Have you read diamond dust?
Yes, previously
Yes, now that you recced it to me
No
Author: @sazandorable
Fandom: Golden Sun
Ship: Mia/Sheba
Rating: T
Summary:
Sheba learns how to find warmth in the blizzard.
Submitted by @firedjinni
Submitter's comments:
cute and very well characterized rarepair <3
people on here make ocs and they're mostly men and they ship characters and they're always men and they have favourite characters and they're always men but sometimes they say the men are like women not trans ones though because that would be guh-ross and harsh the vibe of the #fandomspace and they write fanfiction about men and talk about how complicated and #deeplywritten their male favs are and they'll watch movies and tv shows with mostly male casts in every way that matters and not question it because well what do you want them to do about it and they don't even care that that's what they're doing to them it's pure coincidence they always like the male characters better it's pure chance that women are only interesting as yaoi cheerleaders and actually when they write female characters as yaoi cheerleaders they're doing them a favour because they were just so poorly written in the source material it's the charitable thing to do men men men men men men men and if you say anything about it well you're being a killjoy you're being no fun you're being homophobic you're being a misandrist god what is it about women right what is it about women always trying to ruin our fun? why do they care so much? they're just women. who wants to think about women at all.
Golden Sun is an old fandom by now, but there's still a lot of unexplored territory as far as fan fiction is concerned. There are a few major types I see:
Novelizations and rewrites
Shipping focused almost exclusively on playable characters
Canon scenes with added detail or alternate POV
Naturally there's a smattering of porn, some drabbles, and plausible canon inserts (scenes that didn't happen in the text, but are reasonable extensions of what could have happened between major plot events). But it's uncommon to see much about the time between The Lost Age and Dark Dawn, and there's thirty years of wiggle room to write anything from follow-on adventures to the trials of childrearing.
It's also uncommon to find stories that don't concern any of the 16 playable adepts across three games. Granted, it's pretty hard to write about things going on in (e.g.) Suhalla, Apojii, or Mikasalla, considering none of those places have named characters, but places like Kalay, Lemuria, and Izumo all have three named resident NPCs. I understand that Uzume, Susa, and Kushinada perhaps don't so readily capture one's imagination once you know they're exports from Japanese mythology, but they're all wide open for exploration following the game's adaptation of this myth. Sure, Uzume dies at some point during the thirty year timeskip, but it's also perfectly fine to pretend Dark Dawn doesn't happen and just do something else.
I'm only bringing this up because it's weird to me how constrained by canon the Golden Sun fandom seems to be. I don't think it helped that Dark Dawn declared some victors in the shipping wars, but folks in other fandoms are perfectly happy to slap a couple of characters into circumstances romantic or otherwise that are so far removed from canon as to be practically contradictory. There's a contingent of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses fandom that's perfectly happy to contrive endlessly weird scenarios pairing Rhea with Edelgard, with all the romantic and geopolitical outcomes such contrivances entail.
(I mean, fuck, if you even bring up shipping Sheba with anyone in front of some people, they immediately get squicked out and say "ew no she's a teenager". Never mind the fact that there's a point between TLA and DD that she would unambiguously have to be an adult, party member ages in the GBA games are likely bullshit anyway.)
I once read a long and fascinating Golden Sun fan fiction concerning Mia and Chalis that started during the latter half of Dark Dawn's events and continued beyond what would've been the game's narrative conclusion. I can no longer find it on AO3, so I assume the author deleted it and/or their account. I loved reading it for how it explored trust as the basis of any relationship, and how it got into the depths of both Chalis and Mia. While I think the principal trait any half-awake Golden Sun fan would attribute to Mia is compassion, this author's Mia was also tempered by hardship, the tribulations of motherhood, and the tug-of-war of de facto leadership. She slips into the kind of sarcasm you'd expect after quips like "What, is there a pharmacy down there?" This author's Chalis was deeper than the villain we see in Dark Dawn, for they fleshed out the hints about the Tuaparang's society into a framing that cast Chalis as both villain and victim.
I wish I could read it again. I wish the fandom had more things like it.
It's interesting to think about the intersection of these two facts:
Films reflect the time period in which they were made.
Our most popular films right now are all reboots, sequels, and reused IPs.
On one hand, you could make the case that our generation is being deprived of its place on cultural timeline, because (as far as the mainstream goes) all we're being given is rehashed ideas from other time periods. Seems rather boring to analyze.
But on the other hand, I think future film historians will find that this era is culturally fascinating. Not because of the "nostalgia bait" itself, but because it represents the emergence of independent cinema and streaming.
When TV was invented, people could watch filmed media at home. You no longer had to go to a theatre just to watch cartoons or comedies.
So the studios responded with a wave of epics in the 1950s. They said "Okay, you can get Dick Van Dyke at home, but you can't get Ben-Hur." Television couldn't compete with the budget, big name stars, or visual tech that film studios could offer. They were financially incentivized to blow your socks off with visuals and big name stars.
But with the emergence of streaming and independent film, that's no longer the case. A-listers are happy to take TV roles, and TV offers Hollywood-level visuals. You don't need to mess with the theatre system at all. It's easier than ever to make good-looking movies and share them with the masses with no major studio backing.
So what's the one thing that studios still have going for them? What's the one thing that Disney can give you that an independent filmmaker can't? Yoda. The Little Mermaid. Iron Man. Fucking brands. That's all they have, so that's all they sell.
We aren't being sold reboot after reboot because it's what the people want to see, or because our current culture is somehow more boring and lifeless than ever before. It's because it's the last stranglehold that these soulless studios have over the industry. They will shove your own childhood down your throat because their domination over previous generations is the one thing they have left to sell to this one.
Here is the church, dlc characters, and the eisners and what games I think they would’ve played
Here’s the post for the main houses

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💚❤️🪽 // Base by @/_imsuna
First art collab with @/mlkywyart (twitter | bsky) and it's Rheagard 🤭🎉🎉
👇 behind the scenes