>:D

:DDDDDD

or he's a sentimental fool (I say that lovingly) and decided to whip out Vladcard knowing that Integra and Seras would "get" why it's meaningful he showed it to them at that moment.

Hee, plowed. Thank you though, oh my gosh! I’m so thrilled to hear you’re impressed! 

.............................. i can't believe you said that considering I *just* made a dadbod incubus priest who's basically That with a(n actually accurate) southern accent.

absolutely! that’s what the internet’s for.

(( replying to the #s i got for this meme one at a time, since i won’t be able to answer them all in one sitting!))

i imagine the canonical answer to this is going to be MissingNo in the original Pokémon games.  remember how fantastically fruitful that little glitch was?  the stern warnings to absolutely never capture MissingNo because it could erase your save, and also people speculating MissingNo was a fallen form of Mew, or a Pokémon they deleted from the game, or THE MOST POWERFUL POKÉMON, yada yada—

except i was a sanctimonious know-it-all asshole who shut down my best friend when he came running to me with wild speculation about what does MissingNo mean.  it's not a secret pokémon, Eric, the computer in the Game Boy just pointed to the wrong number and that's why you see a glitch instead of a Pokémon.  (yes, i was also the asshole who informed my two best friends that Santa wasn't real.  when we were five.)  (also, lol, i forgot that baby-me was frantically yahoo! searching the glitch and reading up on integer overflows and shit to try and grok it; small wonder i became a hacker)

BUT, that's just a fun little pop culture footnote these days.  a cute memory.  see, the glitch that wigged me out the most was for a game that i had not even played when i heard of it.  i still haven't played the game.  i just read an article about it in Electronic Gaming Monthly.

see, apparently Phantasy Star Online had a bad glitch for a while, where your character might randomly freeze, unable to move, and then stuff around you would stutter and stop, and then your whole fucking screen would turn blue.  you'd turn you Dreamcast off and on again, and when you logged back in, all your character and save data was gone.

EGM described this under a huge bold headline in the back of the magazine, WARNING: ALL PHANTASY STAR ONLINE PLAYERS, or something like that.

i was ten or eleven at the time.  the idea of losing everything, just like that, and in such a horror-movie fashion—i mean, damn, that article in EGM felt like being in a zombie apocalypse movie and reading some vague rumors about a weird flu in Santiago or whatever.  i thought about losing all of my game saves just like that.  then i thought about losing everything, just like that.

i was already a pretty existential ten-or-eleven-year-old; i generally read EGM by flashlight around 1am; it didn't take much to freak me out, in that state.

for months afterward, i had nightmares where i was walking around, and suddenly i couldn't move, i'd be paralyzed.  then all my friends would freeze up, too, and everything around me would turn into a solid sheet of blue and—well, then i woke up, because you know what happens next.  character-death, or real-death, take your pick.

lots of games (Undertale, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc) have fucked around with the delete-your-save meta stuff in recent years, but none of them had the horror of that one little EGM writeup.

are you kidding this is EASY

- fake date zaeed, because he would be a great mix of arm candy and bodyguard, but i get the feeling his bachelor habits would get infuriating after a while

- enemies to lovers daud, because jo already did that

AND

if you send a lua a long-ass message