#jawkan talkin

Like, again, I like walking into every fight knowing I am intended to be able to clear it in games built in that manner, it's very fun to navigate a battle with the foreknowledge that it's possible for me to handle in some way or another, but this design also inherently removes a lot of the tension from the situation, which is fine for a heroic fantasy adventure, but less useful in, say, a survival horror campaign

and "should encounters be assumed to be winnable" is just a tiny part of encounter design, which itself is just one segment of a larger game, and it already has such a strong effect on how the game feels, imagine how much it'd change if you altered even more of your approach, or removed the concept of them entirely

Like, he says that because the game is cruel and unfair and unforgiving, that means it's not fun, but then he describes a very deep and visceral satisfaction with experiencing the game, which is, you know, fun, bc sometimes it is genuinely fun to be put into a situation that is intentionally mean and painful even if it doesn't look or sound particularly fun to outside observers

Mash's name is actually most likely derived from "Matthew"! which we can assume because in the first year's valentine's event she wrote her name as such on the cake she makes for it (it's fixed to "Mash" the year after)

AS FOR MASH AND LILITH (LiliMash? Mashlith? idk)

well first of all I should be up-front in saying: I don't speak Japanese and I can't read it either so everything I am about to say is based off of fragmented secondhand information which may not be perfectly accurate BUT you don't need much more when you have enough yuri madness-

The scene that covers the main thrust of their beef is here (starting at 6:33), but if you don't have time to watch it the tl;dr is Lilith asked Mash to figure out how she feels about her and Mash figures that she hates her, which she confirms and then goes on to say what she loves about humanity is that they're fickle and imperfect and emotional and hates that Mash's inability to bring herself to truly hate anyone goes against this, that it makes her too pure, so she hates her for it

"this is a lot of hate"

YES, HOWEVER- an important piece of context is that Mash is a homunculus, she was grown in a lab for the express purpose of working for the future of humanity as a demi-servant, that taken with Lilith being a demoness this means both of the women in the conversation have had experience in being treated as inhuman, so while the text is "I hate you for your purity" you can subtextually read it as "I hate you because you're wasting your chance to be human"

Now, building on this, we have Lilith's 3rd NP: "To You, A Misled and Faint Prayer"

While it's already fruity as hell to dedicate an entire NP to a specific individual ("A present for Mash Kyrielight" like, okay lesbotron5000), The part that makes me lose my mind is "I'm sure I will always hate you. Just like you will always hate me too"

If you just take this at face it's "we will always hate each other" BUT with the additional context that one of the things Lilith loves about humanity is their ability to hate one another and considers it a quintessential piece of the human experience recontextualizes it and allows it to instead be read as "I will always treat you as human, and you will always treat me as human in turn"

"so do they like each other or hate each other?"

Yes!

It's messy and it's complicated and they're so similar but so intractably different and they want to kick the shit out of each other and that conflict pushes them apart but also brings them so so close and

That being said, it must be pointed out that the show itself is kind of obviously very on-board with them; Sakiko screaming over the side of the ferry about how she's sick of dealing with social mores, the conversation afterwards where she talks about leaving all that behind while a giant "DO NOT ENTER" sign takes up the entire screen, her making the pointed decision to address her directly as "Uika" in the band meeting following, etc;