The Yoshiderrrr

Oughhh the parallelssss

Comparing the game's nicest npc who literally everyone agrees is the most pure and innocent to Queen Genocide McWarcrime, arguably one of the most divisive figures in the lore, so fucking good

I fucking love this game

Miyazaki i see what you did there

am taking perverse pleasure in reminding people it's 2025. that's a star trek year. silly little science fiction number. except it's happening, and DANG ain't it underwhelming!

Is that lord of the rings in the background audio or am i insane

I think this is VERY funny, okay? I drew this for 2-3 months

The most interesting part with Leda for me, is that for all of the murder she does, she doesnt seem to enjoy it in any way. When she fights Ansbach, the Hornsent, Thiollier or you, she always seems to express some form of regret at having to kill you. Of course, she doesnt actually have to kill anyone, she is just very quick to use murder as a solution, but it doesnt seem to stem from a desire to hurt others, it feels like she genuinely believes this is the only way forward.

She says she is mistrustful of others, and while that convo is kinda funny, it really does feel like she has lost all trust in mankind. In the dialogue about Hornsent's crusade, while most people remember the "they were never saints" part, I mostly remember "Man is by nature a creature of conquest". It really does speak to how she views people, and it seems like she believes Miquella's forced age of compassion is the only way to change things for the better, that without his control, everyone would just constantly be at each other's throats. It almost makes me wonder about the needle kights. Did she kill them for the same reason ? Were they actually disloyal to Miquella ? Was there already infighting before she came along ? Whatever the case, Leda is now utterly convinced of Miquella's cause, and is ready to do anything to bring him to power.

It's a very interesting dynamic with Miquella, who is always portrayed as a very hopeful figure, always trying to create a kind and compassionate world, while Leda is a very pessimistic one. She seems to almost embody his "through whatever means necessary" philosophy. Had Miquella succeeded, i could almost see her taking on a role similar to the one Messmer took for Marika, an enforcer, someone who does the dirty jobs so their god can keep their hands clean. Hell, she's almost started to do it by herself, Miquella wouldn't even need to ask her.

How awkward do you think this interaction was ?

you! tumblr user!

Do you guys get me or am i reaching way too far rn

Alia Atreides written in the style of Disco Elysium with the skills being represented by her ancestors in Other Memory, hit post

The Professor Case - Three Sad Faces and Three Dead Men

There is a man in your life you love, admire and respect more than anything. Your greatest desire is to follow in his footsteps, and to eventually make him proud. However, before that can happen, he tragically dies under obscure circumstances. You’d do anything to know what happened; to give him some sort of justice. But the more you know about the truth, the more you realise that maybe he wasn’t as noble as he always appeared. Before his death, he left you a letter that you didn’t receive.

Are you Barok van Zieks, Asougi Kazuma or Gina Lestrade?

The heart of the drama of the Professor case is made up by this series of cascading tragedies, where each is both a repetition of and directly caused by its predecessor. The cycles of betrayal, disillusionment and grief play out in delayed motion across time, the same story with different characters wound to different speeds so they all come crashing to their endpoint at once. The spiral of repetitive continuation joins the three tales both into one continuous history, and also the same tale interposed three times upon itself. Kazuma’s story cannot begin without Barok’s coming to its first temporary end, just as Gina’s cannot without Kazuma’s catalysis. Yet as we line up Gina, Kazuma and Barok, we see the same face, displaced across time – tearful and shocked, furious and vengeful, bitter and resigned. In the same way, we see Klint layered over Genshin layered over Gregson: deeply loved, sharply fallen, and dead.

This triangulation, more than anything else, emphasises the game’s thematic throughline that the past cannot be put to rest without the truth. Klint’s lies become Genshin’s lies become Gregson’s lies, just as Barok creates Kazuma creates Gina. Past, present and future collapse into a grief that endlessly reproduces itself. The impossibility of moving forwards when the threads of bewilderment and doubt remain manifests itself in the literal reiteration of the event, again and again. Time loops between the courtroom and the graveyard. The years pass. The years do not pass.

In this temporal overlap, Gina articulates the grief that wells beneath Barok’s bitterness and Kazuma’s sharpness, while Kazuma’s single-minded vengeance is a warning as to how easily that grief might be shaped into a sword, and Barok shows by example what lies at the end of that path: ten years later still unhappy, still chained. As they come together in the courtroom, Gina in the witness stand, Barok in the dock and Kazuma at the prosecution’s bench, it is a symbolic trial of not the self, but the role. To leave one of them still trapped in the morass is somehow to leave all of them – their shackles, after all, are the same. The question that passes between them, from corner to corner is this: is it a crime, to have grieved so deeply that your grief became a weapon? The outcome of the trial doesn’t quite answer this question. It asks another instead: is grief grounds for justice? And crucially: who was holding the weapon that grief made of you?

However, of this unhappy triangle, Barok is the only one to have actually completed the climactic, mistaken, mistrial of justice. He is the only one to have received closure at the cost of integrity, and to have lived with the aftermath. He is the only one to not only have believed he knew the truth, but also that he had delivered justice. While Kazuma stands on the cusp, and Gina is literally at ground zero, Barok has both the advantage and misfortune of hindsight. Hindsight – and reflection. He hasn’t escaped his story. But he has walked out the other way, into what he believes is the long epilogue, when it’s in fact just the sagging middle. It’s what allows him sharp, pointed insight into the other two: he recognises himself in their faces.

Van Zieks: I say nothing of whether or not I'm the Reaper. That's the task of this court to decide. But there is one thing I can say unequivocally: That girl is no detective.

Gina: Eh? Wha...? Nah, that's right, I ain't. I'm an inspector!

Van Zieks: Repeating rumours heard around the Yard... Reading entries from a notebook of unconfirmed origin... That's not testimony. It's practically a script. No doubt the rest of this trial will go exactly as you've clearly planned.

Kazuma: .........

Van Zieks: Your hatred of me is understandable. In your mind, I'm sure I am the Reaper...who sent your father to the gallows all those years ago.

Kazuma: ...!

Van Zieks: But you're in danger of becoming a far more sinister Reaper yourself... ...by attempting to have me condemned with this feeble excuse for testimony.

The ease with which Barok identifies the truth is striking. This is a scripted trial. Gina’s grief is causing her professional integrity to fall apart, a fact that Kazuma is using to indict Barok. Kazuma’s anger is causing his professional integrity to fall apart as he treats the courtroom like his personal arena for revenge. Kazuma’s anger, Barok demonstrates, is something he understands, deeply. Gina’s grief is something to this day he mirrors. Yet, Barok harshly points out, emotion is no excuse for a miscarriage of justice. It’s a show of both deep understanding and scathing judgement. The cool-eyed detachment with which he evaluates the situation is admirable. It is also something Barok from ten years ago would not have been able to do.

However, there is a fatal flaw in all this, which is that it’s much easier to recognise when an accusation is false from one end than the other. As ever, Barok stops just short of applying the same tier of insight into the events of ten years past, looking just to the left of the gaping wound that the trial left. Even as more and more irregularities come to light, it is only at the final push that he truly faces to the idea that this one trial could have been a massive pile of lies. This is an incredible blind spot, coming from the man who espouses he ‘trusts no one’, who has the both the suspicion and the deductive ability to find out Gregson’s position as the Reaper. It is an incredible blind spot, coming from the man who had the clarity to suspect, even for a moment, his own, dear, brother.

It's here that we see Barok’s true weakness – and the damning piece of evidence of how deeply he is still chained to that moment, ten years ago. Can a prosecutor of Barok’s calibre truly never have suspected, if not at the time, then ten years later? Even as Sithe’s lies came to light, even as Gregson’s involvement in the Reaper became apparent? But as Barok rejected Klint’s guilt, so he rejects that the events were not as he believed them to be: on the basis of evidence, to be sure, but evidence given disproportionate weight for how much he did not want it to be true. Even as Kazuma desperately links every piece of evidence, no matter how unfitting, into his certain conclusion that Barok is Gregson’s killer, so Barok takes what evidence he receives and slots them neatly into the narrative he most wants to believe: this man died so my brother cannot be guilty, the ring was found so Genshin must have committed the crime. He refuses to entertain alternative pathways, even as doubt creeps in. Even as things stop fitting. Until the very last moment, when he is forced with damning evidence to change his stance, he clings to his brother’s innocence. Within him grind the cogwork of his truth-seeking logic machine mind against the bloodied flesh of his heart. After ten years, that flesh is wearing thin.

It's this that brings him to the exact same level as Kazuma and Gina, who fight for Genshin and Gregson’s innocence respectively. However, it cannot all be true at once. All three cannot be innocent together: something has to give. As each of them beseech Ryuunosuke for comfort, they find instead the truth.  

But let’s step back a little. The similarity between Gina, Kazuma and Barok make the differences in how they are treated startling. Barok, on displaying a lapse in professional integrity following the worst events of his life, receives full prosecutorial authority from Stronghart to go head-to-head in the trial of his brother’s death. Meanwhile, Stronghart allows Kazuma to slide in sideways, using Gregson as a cudgel to pin Barok for Genshin’s death. But Gina, when she breaks down in court and cries out that Gregson is innocent, is harshly reprimanded and told to hand in her badge. Why the difference?

The answer is obvious: a noble young prosecutor is a much more useful tool to Stronghart than a barely literate pickpocket from the streets of East London. The debt Barok owed to Stronghart protected Stronghart from suspicion for nearly ten years, while enabling Stronghart to centre an entire conspiracy around Barok in the blind spot that debt created. Similarly, Kazuma is a useful tool to wipe out the Reaper conspiracy’s last members and exonerate Stronghart once and for all while being easily disposed of as a foreign exchange student. But what’s Gina got to give? What value does Gina have that Stronghart might find useful? The answer is: nothing. Gina has nothing, and so it’s her that Stronghart lets loose on his distaste, his condescending dismissal. It’s her that he belittles and talks over – that his true feelings for those he has used comes out.

Barok is the first and most perfect paradigm of the narrative that the other two emulate. Immediately after his brother’s death, he seeks out the culprit (so he thinks) and prosecutes him successfully in court for the crime which he seeks vengeance for. Kazuma is a little shakier: ten years after his father’s death, he seeks out the culprit (so he thinks) and prosecutes him on the basis of an unrelated crime while barely hiding that his real reason is his father’s death. It’s with Gina that the real tears in the fabric show: disoriented and grieving, she’s dragged into court and gives emotional testimony that implicates someone she’s not even 100% sure is guilty. She isn’t even the one doing the prosecuting. These are different stories, with the difference in perfection scaled primarily by how perfect a tool Stronghart sees in them. But they are also the same story, dressed better or dressed worse. And they reach the same ending.

When the dust finally begins to settle, we zoom into how each of them react to the momentous change in their understanding of their own lives. Standing before Klint’s portrait, Barok takes the painful step to acknowledge that his brother is truly ‘no more’, even as he wears his prosecutor’s badge with mixed feelings to the complex legacy left behind. Kazuma entrusts Karuma to Ryuunosuke with the promise to retake it after mastering the violence he suddenly realised he was capable of. But Gina, surrounded by her friends, takes back Gregson’s pocket watch and vows to uphold his legacy by becoming a great detective herself.

At first glance, this raises a lot of question marks. Has everyone forgotten that Gregson was involved in a double-digit number of murders? Well, to some extent, yes. However, from another perspective, while Barok has to grapple with the person he became in upholding a false legacy, while Kazuma has to grapple with the person he felt the potential of being in chasing a false vengeance, Gina had not yet taken the steps towards becoming an upholder of falsehoods herself, wittingly or unwittingly. It is with this uncomplicated sincerity that she can take on Gregson’s legacy, since it never yet had the chance to twist her into bitterness or hatred – as it did to Barok, and as it did to Kazuma. While she may have to grapple with Gregson, she does not have to grapple with herself. In the worst time of their lives, Barok had Stronghart, who plunged him into a ten-year long darkness and scapegoated him as the Reaper. Kazuma had no one, only memories, and anger enough almost to kill. But Gina had Ryuunosuke, and through him, the truth – for all.

Okay so we have this huge problem with forgetting about everything that’s happened by the time the next election rolls around so I’d like to keep a running list of things as they’re happening to help remind us when the 2026 midterms roll around. And please add to this if I’ve missed anything.

January 2025:

Donald Trump pardoned 1500 people who participated in the insurrection of January 6th, including those who violently assaulted and nearly killed police officers.

Donald Trump has declared that trans and non-binary people don’t exist.

Donald Trump is working towards firing everyone in the government who isn’t loyal to him.

Donald Trump has effectively fired everyone who he claims is an “illegal DEI hire” …whatever that means

Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization

Congress are trying to pass the Laken Riley Act to, effectively, round up every immigrant in the country, including LEGAL immigrants

Donald Trump removed caps on prescription drug prices.

Donald Trump wants to withhold federal aid to help combat the LA wildfires and help the thousands of people who have been displaced and lost their homes.

The Department of Justice has put a hold on all civil rights cases.

Donald Trump has cut off aid to Ukraine.

Laken Riley Act has been passed by Congress and is awaiting being signed into law by the President. Here’s the breakdown of the votes: House Senate

Donald Trump purged a dozen inspectors general from the federal government and intends to replace them all with people loyal to him.

Pete Hegseth has been confirmed as Secretary of Defense. Here’s the breakdown of how the Senate voted. Note, it was a 50-50 tie that JD Vance had to break.

Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Colombia after the Colombian government turned away two airplanes carrying migrants. Columbia has retaliated by imposing a 25% tariff of its own on US goods.

Donald Trump has also issued a travel ban for Colombian citizens and revoked visas from Colombian migrants coming to the US.

Donald Trump has now backed off the tariffs and other threats against Colombia. Note for future reference: this comes just hours after Trump made the threat in the first place and he and the Colombian president got into a big fight on social media.

Nearly 1,000 migrants were arrested mostly in Chicago on January 26th by ICE and ICE has been told to meet a quota of 75 migrant arrests every day.

Donald Trump rescinded an anti-discrimination executive order from Lyndon B. Johnson

Donald Trump signed an executive order banning trans people from serving in the military and also ordered that people who were discharged for refusing to get mandatory vaccines be reinstated.

Donald Trump has frozen all federal grants to institutions.

After pressure from state governments, activist groups, and the general public, the White House has rolled back some of the freezes on federal funding.

This.

Donald Trump is trying to fire all federal employees who don’t want to return to the office (work-from-home saves the federal government millions of taxpayer dollars in overhead). He also sent an email to federal employees saying that if they’re not loyal to him, they’ll be investigated.

Donald Trump has signed the Laken Riley Act into law.

Donald Trump has said he doesn’t think Palestinians should be allowed to return to Gaza but instead should be sent to Egypt and Jordan.

Also this.

Donald Trump has ordered undocumented immigrants to be sent to Guantanamo Bay

Donald Trump signed an executive order to expand federal funding for school choice programs. [x]

Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that he will deport visa-holding students who protest against Israel. [x]

Donald Trump has blamed DEI for the plane crash that killed 67 people in Washington D. C. [x]

Donald Trump signed an executive order that schools should no longer teach about racism and discrimination. And that schools should only teach history that is “patriotic” [x]

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna wants to add Donald Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore. [x]

Trump’s Department of Education has called book bans a hoax. [x]

I’ll keep adding to this list as new things come up and, again, please feel free to add anything I’ve missed. I know that in this world of constant news it’s easy to forget, so let’s give our future selves a little help!