#dowhatyoulike

Moonlight (2016) | Heated Rivalry (2025)

“I’ve always loved queer cinema,” Hudson Williams says. “I love queer stories. There’s something about them that I feel are very universal. Moonlight was a movie that shattered me. Brokeback was a movie that shattered me. It’s the inability to express yourself—that something is so intrinsic in who you are, yet you feel it’s inappropriate. You feel it’s not celebrated, you feel societally less worthy. It’s something very deep that you can’t control.”

oof i'm probably not the best person to ask bc i've put probably a combined 500 hours into both games at least so i fully do not remember what it was like to be brand new at either of them

i think honestly the most important thing to have when approaching both hades games is not so much skills or fast reflexes or whatever but persistence and willingness to be intentional when trying different builds and boon/weapon combinations (certain things work very well together and others do not, and knowledge of that imo is way more important than brute force combat skill). imo supergiant designed the game to be challenging but not punishing in a way that many soulslike (or actual souls) games are meant to be, you're not meant to throw yourself at the same boss a million times in a row with the same build just trying to get the perfect timing and muscle memory

in that way it's very much a souls-lite—you're meant to die many times and make meta-progression that slowly allows you to incrementally get stronger and opens up new systems that add more complexity to the game but give you more tools and options to progress further, while encouraging you to continue doing so by basically being essentially a dating sim back at your home base so you always have people to talk to and individual character/relationship storylines to progress, and most of that character/narrative stuff is not locked behind actual progress in the "actual game" wrt defeating bosses (in fact if you make it too far too early, you can fuck up the progress of certain dialogue trees because they're really not built for you to jump straight past multiple difficulty checkpoints and are designed to dole out story gradually as you make progress at defeating each boss)

ANYWAYS idk all that is to say that i think you can have fun playing hades 2!!! i am really enjoying both on its own merits as its own game and as a sequel to the first one. i think the important thing is just to be open to just hanging out in the game world and fucking around on the runs and also in your little home base and not stress out too much about how far you're getting and not giving up too soon if you're not making that progress

ALSO the game does have a easier difficulty option that you can turn on and off at will i think? idk how much it helps personally but i've heard it does a good job of scaling based on how much you're dying so it gives you as much support as you need without totally trivializing the challenge of the combat

god i feel you, i was NOT interested into the whole ahsoka thing for the exact same reason. fuck rosario dawson! all my homies hate rosario dawson! for what is worth, i tried to ignore her as much as possible during the episodes and focused on sabine, chopper and the sith(?) master/apprentice and it was way better than i expected (especially since i didn't see a lot of r*sari*)

i'm not a deep dive expert so i cannot promise that i have the whole story figured out. there's a not a lot of articles or details but these struck me out:

the description of the assault is absolutely disgusting

In 2020, 18 of the 20 allegations were "withdrawn voluntarily without settlement," and Dawson spoke out about the lawsuit

r*sari* talked a little bit about it to vanity fair and her answer srsly rubs me wrong:

Ahsoka does mean a great deal to people, and they’re deeply invested in who she is. So, Rosario, I want to ask you about something that’s outside of this story of The Mandalorian, and that’s the concern in the fandom about a lawsuit that was filed against you last year by a longtime family friend. The claim accused you and other family members of anti-trans bias, and you’ve called the lawsuit false and baseless. But what do you say to those Star Wars fans who hear this and believe the worst—that you are transphobic?  

Dawson: Well, firstly, I just want to say I understand that, and why people were concerned, and are concerned. I would be too if I heard some of those claims. But I mean, as we’re seeing right now in these past months, and just recently, actually, the truth is coming out. Every single claim of discrimination has been dismissed by the person who made them, and as you’ve said, the fact that this is coming from someone I’ve known since I was a teenager, the better part of my life, and who my family was trying to help as we have many times in the past, it really just makes me sad. But I still have a great empathy for him.

Court records show 18 of the 20 claims were withdrawn voluntarily without a settlement, and his lawyer left the case. Two counts remain alleging a physical altercation, and a judge will rule on whether that can move forward next month. There are people that would say, “Well, this is just another example of a wealthy, famous person overpowering the system.” So what would you say to those people who are unconvinced, both about this case and about what you actually believe about trans people?