#yeenwords

Was poking around the ISAT script website, as you do, and noticed a little something

We all know how Wish Craft is generally triggered by strong willpower and rituals of repetition, yeah?

Well, there's this subtle (in-game--the script site makes it much more apparent) glowy effect to the text every significant time Wish Craft is invoked. Including an instance I hadn't considered!

But I don't think GLaDOS actually holds the sentiments she's expressing. Rather, they're a means to an end.

I get this mostly from her lines in co-op on the subject:

"Did you know humans frown on weight variances? If you want to upset a human, just say their weight variance is above or below the norm."

She calls Chell fat not because she thinks she's fat or that she personally finds anything wrong with weight variances, but because she knows calling humans fat makes them feel bad, and she's bitter about being killed and wants to make Chell feel bad.

Same goes with her being adopted. As soon as it doesn't emotionally or pragmatically benefit GLaDOS to make fun of Chell for being fat or adopted, she actively refutes Wheatley's attempt at bullying her for these things:

"And...? What, exactly, is wrong with being adopted?" "Also: Look at her, you moron. She's not fat."

She walks back her previous derogatory assertions as if they don't mean anything to her, because they don't. She never believed them in the first place.

She treats Rattmann's schizophrenia much the same way. She uses it to try and manipulate him, to make him doubt himself enough to come out of hiding where she can kill him, the same way she tries to make Chell doubt herself and turn back when she's escaping the facility back in Portal 1. The ableism she expresses is not a genuinely held belief, but a means to an end that she has no qualms about using.

Oh god. So Zarla posted this on Jan 4th (backreading, glad the medical stuff went well zar!)

To get reference I popped open the archive, and posted since then there's been three distinct scenes over the past four pages... One more scene, and it's all over.

God, man, I've known it's coming for awhile, but even as just a reader, it is so surreal that Handplates is coming to its end.

I've grown up with it, got into it as a tween when the latest page was Can you overclock a soul, and it very well may have founded my love for whumpy hurt-comfort stuff. It was the thing that finally got me into Undertale (and boy did I get into Undertale). I've enjoyed other fanworks and similar tropes in the years past, but Handplates stands out to me still, and I've really come to admire the dedication from the writer-artist for keeping this up for seven goddamn years, for how poignant this story has managed to stay throughout all of them, and as I've learned to understand it more, how good the writing is as a whole. (I recently talked my poor friend's ear off about the interweaving dynamics at play in the true lab era alone.)

I'm an adult now (strange as it is to say that too) and man. I am never gonna be normal about this frickin' comic. You need only play Something Wicked or The Long Way Back, and my brain goes right back to those Starbot/Vade dubs and some of the most heart-wrenching, iconic scenes of this story. It's all so tightly woven and hurts masterfully. (And certain pieces of dialogue remain a jab in the heart with how real and personal they are, honestly, this last arc in particular and its timing has helped me process some realizations in my own life.)

I'll write up some actual coherent analysis of it sometime probably. God. I dunno. I just had to gush. @zarla-s, your maudlin comic about font skeletons is genuinely amazing, and it and your work as a whole have been a huge inspiration for my writing and art over the years. Thank you.

So this screenshot just made me realize how genius it was to have Adora carry her sword around like this once she masters transforming it. It's right in s4, when she pursues her 'destiny' almost to her end, when she realizes she's being exploited and yet that she cannot stop the role she is bound to. And the sword that binds her to that fate is literally a CUFF AROUND HER WRIST.