things I like

its fun

i can do literally whatever I want

cons of writing

Absence.

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-She hears inklings about it, but Barret explains the full story about her parents and what happened to Corel when she’s ~10 years old (albeit, omitting some of the details about what happened to Dyne). She seems to take it well, at least at the time. Barret also gives her the pendant then.

-Being on the move, having little money, and going through traumatic, dangerous events when she was so young had a huge impact on her. She was forced to grow up super quickly and act overly mature for her age. As an adult, she still feels the need to be a leader/look after people, but she has resentment for the childhood she didn’t really get to have.

-Despite this, she doesn’t really have resentment for Barret. She understands why he has spent so much time away from her and respects him for trying to make a difference. He’s always been, and will always be, her role model.

-As an adult, she lives in a reconstructed community built in North Corel that is doing much better than in FF7. Barret also lives there with her, but he’s on the move all the time because he’s trying to have a positive impact all over the planet. Marlene respects this, but does wish he would come back a little more often.

-She’s sort of become a leader in her community by virtue of her strong demeanor and confident personality. She’s extremely proud of her status, but also somewhat resentful, as she finds it stressful to look after people all the time.

-(Because of this previous fact, though a lot of people ask or tease her about settling down and having kids, she really isn’t all that interested…)

-When not helping out Corel, she takes the initiative to investigate leads on Shinra and those connected to it. She keeps this secret to most people, though Barret would inevitably find out at some point. He wouldn’t be pleased about her throwing herself into danger, but he also can’t stop her.

-She dual wields pistols as her weapons. Her left one is gold, her right one is silver.

-Actually, she adorns herself with both silver and gold accessories in general, most of them practical. She always wears her pendant. This is because Barret is adorned with silver and Dyne is adorned with gold.

-She definitely has a few tattoos. Barret was there when she got her first one. One of them is an Avalanche tattoo.

-Being an orphan weighs on her way more than she’d like to admit. She used to ask Barret questions about it when she was younger, but once she was old enough to realize that the subject made him incredibly sad, she stopped asking and bottled those feelings up.

-Barret only tells her what exactly happened with Dyne after he slips up and says something about how he doesn’t want her to “do the same things he did.”

-She would have a very difficult time grappling with the fact that Dyne had the chance to come back to her… and chose not to.

-She swears she can still hear Aerith talk to her sometimes…

-All of the party members will come and visit her sometimes on their own accord, some more than others. They’re kinda like aunts and uncles to her. Though, she gets a little miffed when they still treat her like a little kid.

-She swears. A lot. Barret didn’t censor himself around her as a kid and now it’s just part of her regular vocabulary.

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Who’s more sexually desirable: Scar or Thanos?

No context; no middle ground. Choose your fighter.

It happens during the whole vampire questline. It's not related to vampires. I may misremember details so forgive me for that. But you have to go through old dwemer ruins and you meet the last living snow elf in Skyrim. You know, the snow elves. Who were enslaved by the dwemer and went blind and feral and still live in the ruins long after the dwemer are gone. The falmer is what they're called now. Here's the last one who's in their original form.

And oh hey, to get to where you need to go you have to take a path that's an old snow elf coming of age rite of passage. And he's going to take you through it and you're going to learn about this dead culture, this culture that was killed.

And now you've got what you came for and there's one way out. Now that you've learned what the falmer used to be, where they came from, what was lost because of the dwemer enslaving them, you have to go through a falmer village.

It's a narrow canyon lined with huts. There's no way to avoid it, in order to get through you have to kill them. They attack you because that's what they do to people invading their territory. You're invading their village. You have to kill them or they'll kill you. It's the only way out. You feel terrible.

If you stop to loot one of the huts on your way out you'll find a book full of unreadable text. Take it to the winterhold college and give it to the librarian and he'll tell you that it's a remarkable find because it's evidence that falmer have retained intelligence. They're not just mindless feral monsters. They have this book, they've kept this book even though they can't see. They have a culture. Maybe they still remember what happened to them. Maybe that's why they're so mad.

You just killed so many of them. You're going to have to kill many more.

Anyway.