#[this is everything...i ever wanted...to achieve...]

arcadia

Like the strawhats keep commenting that Ace is so polite and restrained compared to Luffy but like. This dude drags himself out of the ocean just to thank them for looking after his brother and offer to help wash dishes. Mans asks "Are these guys bothering you?" and proceeds to blow up an entire fleet with his bare hands. He trips over himself to make sure all of Luffy's crew likes him and no, really, you don't mind that he's a weirdo???? That we, I mean he, are feral little insane guys who take up space and emotional labor and are kind hard to handle? Really???? Cool cool cool hey just a reminder I can help out with anything that needs doing. I got lost in the desert but donnut worry in the 0.6 seconds since you last saw me I have somehow acquired water and provisions for several weeks. Don't ask me how!

"I wanna ask two things about Florida players: I wanna know if there's any players that were as low maintenence as I was as a player on Florida this year?" "It's a funny question, so at one of our rookie dinners Matthew Tkachuck, you know, he got—he, kind-of, gets us talking. 'Who's the highest maintenance guy? Who don't you like?' He asked who was lower maintenance between himself, and Sam Reinhart. And they're both very, very low maintenance, but I said, 'Matthew, like, you... you know, you use one pair of gloves a year, one pair of skates a year, four games one stick. You win. Like, you're the guy.' Reino was so upset he lost. I remember later in the night, we're both, kind-of, shoulder-to-shoulder at a urinal. He's like 'Are you kidding me?' He was pissed! It really bothered him throughout the night! So we, kind-of, still bring it up to him, but he's a great guy! l would... we're very— Oh, actually! Luostarinen! He's next level. So what we do is we give him Barkov's used pants and used gloves. So it's funny we just take, you know, black marker, black the name out Barkov, and he can't—I mean, we have him signed for a couple years, and he asked me, he's like, 'Hey, do you think we could get my name on my gloves?' And I'm like, 'Not re—not really! We're not going to be able to do that for you, sorry.' But he's great! So it's funny whenever Barky gives us something back, we just put it right on his new gear shelf."

every now and then in the feedback channel I see people who feel that Chaos having been deceived by Chronos reduces the moral ambiguity of Chaos's character, and I think that is... not correct? Look, Chaos is as morally shrimp colors as they have always been. In literally the exact exchange in which they confess to having revealed the Fates' location to Chronos, they state that their reason for doing so was to verify whether such choices could be made without the Fates' influence, and then they point out, "Yet they are not so powerful as they appeared." Which is an incredibly petty point to make as they are confessing their own culpability!

Even having been deceived by Chronos, I think, complicates them rather than reducing their complexity. Because look... I don't think that Chronos is a particularly sneaky character, right? Even eg towards the beginning of the game when he's trying ferret out who Melinoe is and what she's up to, he's offputtingly condescending. In what we've seen of him so far, I don't see the capacity to not leave an incredibly slimy impression. But that apparently went entirely over Chaos's head--despite their observation of their creation--despite their concern over Nyx's and Zagreus's absence, which is implied to predate Chronos's approaching them. This doesn't reveal them to be a poor widdle victim, in my opinion; it reveals them to be startlingly and dangerously naive.