#malachi-walker

I have two! This one from 2019

And this one from 2020 that I think I’ve recently reposted already but here it is again ahaha

I wanted to draw catra and adora cuddling on that couch that @malachi-walker​ described in So Difficult, So Simple (and still it feels like coming home) the concept was so cute i needed to draw it out 🥺

i kinda condensed it (only glimmer and lonnie were there to find them asleep) but i really wanted to draw the rest of the gang just cooing and calling them useless lesbians LOL

i am currently rereading mals entire rhythm and blues AU fics, and i love it soooo much, i really recommend it! make sure to read the authors notes before each chapter for cws!

this verse is one of my fav modern au fics, maybe bc i was a bit of a music nerd in high school so i relate (and i literally had to stop playing bc i injured my fingers, not irreparably but it defs changed my relationship to playing violin  LOL), but the writing is Immaculate and the fics set in the past in the Right Zone are heart wrenching but also so so adorable

and the fics in the present where they all hang out and roast the shit out of catra and adora are *chefs kiss*

i was thinking about @malachi-walker‘s Rhythm & Blues on my way home from work and was just like. tao appreciation hours. stan tao. [beat for comedic effect] wait i can draw

mal ily thank you for enabling me-

for me, what makes persona stand out so much from other games is two things - the aesthetics, and the characters.

i really don't need to explain the first one. anyone who's taken one look at a persona game can tell you how slick the style of it is. each game has really dynamic visuals, some of the sleekest ui i've ever seen, and just really neat designs for both characters and personas/shadows. and that's not even touching on the obvious to anyone who's played one of these games, which is the ost. everyone thinks persona soundtracks slap and they're right, because they DO. not just any series can make a rhythm game spinoff using its own soundtracks. i mean i literally didn't KNOW persona until p3d and p5d came out. i played those FIRST. a rhythm game spinoff got me into the series. that certainly says something about the strength of the osts.

the second one is pretty obvious too. an rpg does live and die by its story, and characters are a vital part of that. esp in a relatively slow-paced game like persona, where you spend a lot of time with characters, you do kinda have to like them a fair bit, or at the very least find them interesting. and don't get me wrong, there's a LOT of things i wish atlus did differently with some of these characters. but they do something else that i think is really great. they give you a base chatacter, and just enough details to get your mind wandering. the nature of the games means you really don't get to explore any one person TOO deeply (or at least not as deeply as I'd like lol). it's hard to balance out a huge main cast of dynamic characters so i don't entirely fault atlus for this. but it also means you have all these threads to explore on your own. naoto from p4 springs to mind as a character that has some fascinating leads that are never fully extrapolated in canon (the transgenderism of it all...). and hell, the p5 animation was basically a test run for expanding on akechi's character, and p5r's reworked confidant and third semester is almost ENTIRELY dedicated to this, so atlus even agrees that he wasn't executed as well as he could've been in the original game. even the protags, which yes are all meant to be some form of self-projection, have enough established personality and quirks to make them interesting to explore deeper too (especially p3's minato and p5's akiren imo). and tbh i really like that in a piece of media. i like some room for interpretation, some freedom to take the text and dissect it a bit.

this is just a really quick note, but another thing that makes persona great is the fact that by making the main characters all have some sort of disconnect/problem with authority/society or otherwise making them sort of outcasts, every persona game comes with lgbt and neurodivergent coding for the entire cast, free of charge. i don't have to project anything, the headcanons write themselves-

johannas-motivational-insults said:

I like the toxic friend angle in canon because that’s a very real issue that can come from abuse, but at the same time since we haven’t seen Catra interact with SW in a bit it seems the fandom is forgetting why she is this way. Though tbh I think it’s very hard for anyone who wasn’t abused as a child to understand. The fandom reaction to [Catra] bothers me a lot. People are too judgy with morality and obsessed with purity (much like Christian culture) to the point that they have lost their compassion and ability to see nuance. Catra was never unredeemable. She was never evil, only put up that front to protect herself emotionally and physically.

malachi-walker mentioned you on a post “Catra and the Performative Nature of Villainy and Abuse Survival”

@johannas-motivational-insults Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Catra definitely did become a toxic friend and that needed to be addressed, but the way some members of the fandom have turned it into the end-all be-all of her character and sidestep the fact that she has literally been TORTURED since she was a small child is... Mega distressing. Especially since a lot of Catra anti discourse... Well, it sounds uncomfortably similar to the people who told my parents that I, a 14 year old child, wasn’t worth helping because my grief process wasn’t as nice and pretty as they wanted. And these were people who often didn’t even know a damn thing about me, but they still told my loved ones to cut their losses and leave me to my fate. It’s fucked up to see that dynamic playing out with Catra, given I was actually in that situation.

*

Look, Catra’s done some bad things. Really bad things. And if the people she’s hurt aren’t able to forgive her, that’s understandable. But we the fandom have not been personally victimized by Force Captain Catra (though it may feel that way at times). And we the fandom have all the facts, unlike the characters. Even Adora doesn’t know how bad things were between Catra and Shadow Weaver - as Mal said in the original post, Catra hid that from Adora to avoid showing weakness or causing Adora emotional grief. (And when they do get the facts, their perspectives will probably change somewhat, because they are all decent people.)

:D :D Sometimes Catra really just needs a warm sweater, and if no one’s going to write it for her ya gotta do it yourself! 

FDJHSBKNGFD mal ily-

okay so fun fact actually, both twewy and aa fall into the category of 10/10 games for me. like, i like a lot of games, but very few do i actually think are perfect. both twewy and aa i think are absolute masterpieces. and playing through the aa trilogy again and twewy final remix absolutely solidifies that for me. they’re super different games ofc, but oddly the reasons i like them so much are pretty similar, so i can kinda cheat and answer both at the same time-

the soundtrack and sound design in general. both are absolutely iconic for their soundscapes. you KNOW what twewy sounds like. you KNOW what ace attorney sounds like. i hate when games sound the same as each other, so when the audio stands out that’s a huge positive for me. plus, absolute bops on the osts of both. no one is immune to “twister” or “objection”, we simply are not!

this isn’t so much a “favorite” but i really do have to commend the localization teams for both. both had a LOT of japanese specific humor that i know HAD to be a gigantic pain in the ass to try and get right in localization, and a lot of the changes to make the ideas more accessible to western audiences are great imo. you’ll never get a perfect translation or localization of anything just bc of how language works, but aa 100% keeps the spirit of the original, and twewy is like a damn masterclass in how to make it work.

the characters. i mean obviously both are very character focused kinds of games, so ofc you’d expect the characters to be memorable and enjoyable. but the characters REALLY do stick with me. and what’s more is both have antagonists/rivals that are almost MORE enjoyable than any other character in the games. i won’t go into too much detail bc some of that stuff is major spoilers, but yeah reapers and prosecutors my beloveds <3 but at the same time neither falls into “annoying protagonist” territory, which...idk i feel like it’s super rare to find media where the protagonist and antagonist are equally enjoyable, so i really appreciate both of them for that.