#ourlightsinvain

8. Least favorite lord/protagonist?

haha, this feels like a bit of a cheap answer, but: eliwood's such a nothingburger of a character. the writing in FE7 was generally weaker than the games in the series i care more deeply about, so like, the dude has a serious disadvantage there, but lyn & hector were both reliably more interesting, whereas eliwood is just. bland wonderbread

18. How do you tend to play Fire Emblem? (es. casually, doing Ironman runs, playing it like a visual novel)

i like the strategy & story aspects of the games equally, and i like them in a can't-put-it-down, can't-wait-to-see-what-happens-next, can't-wait-to-try-the-next-map kinda way. ergo, i tend to play: on hard mode (but generally not maddening, because if it's too hard that kills my forward momentum), strategy nerding pretty hard but not exhaustively so (i.e. i'm not gonna spend ages on forums trying to figure out the Objectively Correct Build; that takes away time from PLAYING THE GAME), bolting straight for the ending (e.g. ignoring skirmishes in games that have those), as fast as humanly possible. (it's dangerous for me to open an FE game if i have other important obligations going on in my life lol)

i'm also definitely influenced a bit by who else is playing around me. when Awakening came out, me + my most strategy-nerd FE friend were on an absolute tear to see who could out-hardcore the other, so i was doing EXHAUSTIVE spreadsheets for all the genetics stuff haha.

i also was doing a weekly slowplay of the Tellius games with some friends a few years ago and that was REALLY fun. we'd all played the games before and liked them, so we'd switch who was piloting the map each week and the rest of us would heckle, share opinions about characters/story/tactics/etc. good times <3

27. Any fanfics/fan content you’d recommend? (You can plug your own stuff it’s fine)

oh boy DO I EVER, here's a bunch

MAGVEL

* sleep of the just. occasionally i get to be the person to send this fic to someone who JUST finished Sacred Stones for the FIRST time, and then they send me a capslock WHAT THE FUCK message an hour later and i'm just like :DDDDDDDDDDDD

* l'arachel/rennac silliness! and yet more l'arachel/rennac silliness!

* this one's technically a crossover with Awakening but. L'ARACHEL. MY GIRL. jonphaedrus writes her so well sighs into hands

* we all love creepy ephraim/lyon, yes? yes.

TELLIUS

* i'm completely feral for myaru's naesala/sanaki stuff. here's one, here's another

* here's naesala being a messy disaster for 20k words and i love it so much

* actually the correct soren pairing is: soren/kurthnaga

* i think about the final scene in this sothe/micaiah/pelleas disaster like once a week

* this sothe & tormod friendship thing is so perfect that i've been checking it every day since i got it as a gift & thinkin GOD MORE PEOPLE NEED TO APPRECIATE HOW GOOD THIS SHIT IS

* shinon is my favorite asshole

* bastian & renning. god i can't believe more people haven't fic'd them, but, at least there is this one and it's a great time

THREE HOUSES

* the blue lions defect to the empire & everyone's miserable in the most delicious way. also there's some serious edelgard/ingrid vibes and they're immaculate

* this ashen wolves casefic is just so satisfying and cute and self-contained and fun

* this claude and flayn bodyswap fic is really goofy and fun and pitch-perfect. and if you dig it, there's more where that came from; the author excels at having so much FUN with every fic they touch

* cough there's a certain dimitri/yuri fic that's, uh, very iddy and has every trigger warning imaginable but also rules. i ain't linkin it here, but it's not hard to find, if that sounds compelling lol

and yeah i also write fic! Silent World is probably my personal fave ("Naesala being a bastard for 15k words, what's not to love"), but i've written plenty of other stuff, mostly featuring golden deer & laguz characters~

30. Since horse abuse is currently popular on Tumblr, beat up a dead horse with your take on an oversaturated topic🐴

hmm, idk about aredhel here, I find aredhel's story one of the most creepy and sour notes in the whole silm tbh. agree on the grace notes with morwen and elwing actually! but it is hard to perform helpful tonal exegesis on stories so sparely told; thus it's hard to describe why I think the narrative means fairness to elwing but inappropriate judgment to aredhel. shrug

“[[MOR] I consider myself a progressive but there are a lot of things...”

Yeah I see a lot of young white progressives insinuate that the only moderates or centrists in the world are older white people (probably named Karen) and I'm like... it shows how much they genuinely only interact with white people that they think if they cleared away dastardly Karen, they'd have a happy united mass of la resistance, because naturally immigrants (TM) are revolutionaries waiting to happen which... lol. Consider me making my most grimacing Asian expression

Sure, my family is legit from a country and society far more traditionalist and conservative than the majority of the US in core values and practices, but sure yeah put them on a pedestal born of literally never meeting them

wait, people try to kill you in Stardew? I always thought Stardew was just a big ol’ Harvest Moon clone. (I used to be a Harvest Moon obsessive, sank more hours into Harvest Moon 64 as a child than almost any video game that didn’t begin with the word ‘Pokemon’)

Oh, no, they don’t! The “nobody tries to kill you” etc was in comparison to other genres.

anoteinpink replied to your post “Talk to me about discworld, I will respond pleasantly and definitely...”

whenever i read discworld for some reason i always think of her as "gogol's friend angua" ??? why, i don't know. dogs???

That’s because Angua is my friend. And because I frequently whisper to her to dump Carrot, a sure sign of friendship.

clodia-metelli replied to your post “Talk to me about discworld, I will respond pleasantly and definitely...”

I'm really sad still that Carrot never got a satisfying send off.

Me too........... albeit I don’t know what would be satisfying at this point, snick snick axe o’clock aside. Or barely averted axe o’clock. I didn’t enjoy TFE nearly as much on latest reread in part because it seemed like such a regression from Carrot in Feet of Clay/Men at Arms, etc., although I guess he hit second king puberty. 

ourlightsinvain replied to your post “Talk to me about discworld, I will respond pleasantly and definitely...”

Do you agree with me that Vetinari's sapiosexual stage at 16-17 narrowly saved him from having a profile on The League at 22?

I would love to see this carefully ranked language list

Would you? Because I am a fucking asshole who does not show my work, so that either makes this very interesting or deeply uninteresting depending on your perspective.

Also, I was wrong: it’s top 12.

Modern Standard Arabic 7 Mandarin 13 Portuguese 13 Russian 16 German 17 Malay 20 Swahili 24 Italian 25 Farsi 29 Tamil 32 Dutch 40 Turkish 41

How did I get these numbers? Where did I get the statistics on language speakers? Did I base geographic spread on country or subnational entity areas? Was it based on actual linguistic currency or legal status? According to my computer this list is 8 years old, so while I remember the general idea behind it, the specifics are lost to time.

Also missing Spanish and Japanese since at the time I had a decent grasp on them.

i read the magicians and the magician king and just couldn’t with the pervasive quentinness; i mean the lazy litfic-pastiche sensibility didn’t help but, quentin

the thing I can’t square, which is a big part of what keeps me plodding on, is that Grossman seems too talented for this to be it – this variation of deconstructing the coming of age thing can only take him so far, he has to do something more to fill up the rest of the story, so I’m waiting for him to do something more

Part of the reason I writhe so much at Quentin is that his stupid depressed privileged narcissism is very familiar, and it’s hard not to believe Grossman isn’t writing this from a similar place, and I keep shooting these desperate telepathic messages at Grossman: “okay LISTEN, I get it, you’ve got this down cold, I’m feeling appropriately pricked by this, please please let’s... do something different! Please!”

replied to your link

“What’s Your Social Class?”

this is sort of interesting in the way that it assumes barrenness = middle class or lower middle class, when like there are now many ways to have a barren/empty room coded in different class ways

   the stuff about originals vs prints vs prints of very mainstream artists definitely hasn’t changed though as a shibboleth    

Hmm, I guess a totally barren room with just a couch loses you points, but I’m not sure if that’s a sign of the times or just a flaw in the quiz. I think fancy minimalism was A Thing back then too, if maybe less ubiquitous, I remember my mum snarking that it was only attainable as a parent if you had a cleaner and kept your children locked in their room.

...ok I just googled “minimalist loungeroom” and seeing how many common elements show up in the quiz was pretty funny. The main new things seem to be shag rugs, dead branches in a vase, and bigass windows.