When You Show Up To The Clinic To Get A New Blood Vial After Killing Gascoigne And Iosefka's Voice Sounds

Idk why but i really just felt like posting this particular disco elysium quote rn. No particular reason. No connection at all to recent political events or anything. I just think it's neat.

An attempt at analysing the last scene from The End of Evangelion

Warning ! I will be spoiling both the movie The End of Evangelion, as i am talking about the last scene in the entire film, and the original series, since EoE is by necessity taking place after it.

If you're still here and don't remember exactly which scene i'm talking about, or just really want to read this post abt sth you haven't seen, i am specifically referencing the scene where Shinji attempts to strangle Asuka on the shore of the LCL sea. Without further ado, let's get into it.

Shinji is hurting himself here. He is strangling what might be the only other person left in this world, the only being that could give him the affection he craves.

He is strangling asuka, whose facade he interprets as a mirror of his inner self, an arrogant entitled asshole with no consideration for the feelings of others. He is attempting to better himself by physically assaulting a reflection of his past self.

Asuka is trying to help herself here. She is caressing what might be the only other person left in this world, the only being she could open herself to.

She is caressing shinji, whose facade she interprets as a mirror of her inner self, a lonely child who longs to be loved, but cannot open him/herself to affection. She is attempting to better herself by giving a reflection of her past self the affection it deserved.

Shinji drops his façade, and grows into someone who will take action for what he believes to be right.

He sees the both of them as unredeemable, as deserving of punishment.

Asuka drops her façade, and grows into someone who can provide affection and receive it.

She sees the both of them as two children failed by those who should have helped them, as deserving of love.

They see each other, without façades, without pretenses.

Shinji sees asuka, Asuka sees shinji.

They are forced to confront their diametrically opposed yet coexisting statements on themselves and humanity.

Both are right.

Shinji and Asuka were both selfish entitled pricks who consistently let their impulsive actions hurt the people around them.

Asuka and Shinji were both scared, lost children who were denied the love and support they should have been given.

They deserve retribution and love in equal measure.

This is contradictory.

This is true.

This is real.

This is impossible.

This is Adam and Eve, cast from the garden of Eden, grappling with the knowledge of the world they now possess.

This is human.

How disgusting.

The Hank Pym drama is one of my favorite parts of marvel content tbh

Didn't know which one fit better so i made both versions

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

Another thing to add is that Igon is physically forced to admit he cannot hunt bayle by himself. For all of his recklessness and single-minded devotion to this hunt, he can barely drag himself up the jagged peak. To quote him directly : "My limbs are limbs no more, my heart is twice-over filled with fear, but my soul yet lies on the mountain."

He knows he cant do it by himself, he can barely even psych himself up to do it, let alone actually fight. Hes forced by his circumstances to admit that he cant do it alone, no matter how much he wants to, no matter the depths of his hatred.

In contrast, captain ahab is missing a leg, yes, but he has a peg leg that is sufficient for him and his purpose, he has money to hire a crew, and he has a boat and whaling equipment to hunt with. He has a crew that doesnt really dare to question him bc of his sheer aura of hatred and determination. He has the means to pursue this hunt alone if he wishes, he can be the main character of his story and get revenge himself.

Igon doesnt even have a weapon to start with. He spends an excruciating amount of time making a bow from dead dragon bones and intimately carves every single harpoon he plans on piercing bayle with. Eventually, once he's made weapons, hes forced to admit that by himself, he wont be able to make it up to bayle. He cant walk, cant run, cant afford good equipment, and cant even get to bayle. What he can do, is send his spirit, his hate-driven and relentless soul, to help someone who can. It is the only way he can free himself from the inextricable hold bayle has had over him since they last met.

The Igon and Ahab comparison/difference

This will not be a whole comparison of the two characters, (I'll save that for a rainy day), but there is something I find really interesting with these two gents that I find often gets overlooked as people just go 'oh yeah Igon is captain Ahab' and end the discussion there.

To first get the obvious out of the way, both characters have monomania for their respective foe, and both share a narrative similar to the end of a Faustain tale or at least there story is a continuation of one already told, both crippled after their fights and both will not let injury, judgment, people or God from killing their enemy.

Now, the main and obvious comparison that is made comes from the speech Igon gives when you summon him for the bayle fight. But this speech also shows something, a difference between the two, a difference that ties to their fate.

In igons speech, he introduces the tarnished first, giving them the title of Drake Warrior and only calling himself by his name. Igon wants Bayle dead by any means necessary, and to achieve his goal, he has the humility in asking the for aid of others he views can help (gameplay wise, that is by allowing the tarnished to summon him for the fight). Igon saw the tarnished slay the mountain drake and chose you as someone who could help achieve his goal. Whereas Ahab depite having a whole crew of rallyed up whalers doesn't view the aid of others as anything more than a convince, to him, Moby Dick will be killed by him and only. Constanly disregarding even imput from those who only wish the best for everyone such as Starbuck. Ahabs determination to kill the whale with his own harpoon is what led him to getting killed and dragged to the depths of the ocean, dead, unsuccessful.

Igon incontrast by following and completing his quesline igon dies of his injuries sure, but after successfully defeating Bayle saying

'Bayle the dread, you shall haunt me no longer'

Igon achieved peace and a concussion to his goal, where Ahab did not. Igon recognised where and when he needed help through his rage and determination.

[There's also, tho like the comparison needed with what Moby is representative of compared to Bayle, but that's not important right now]

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

Be wary of linguistics rant, Elden Ring ahead

Ok so I just made a different post about this but I need to elaborate: The Elden Ring messaging system is legitimately such an interesting microcosm about how language is used as a tool and shaped to suit the needs it's being used for. I could actually make an entire study about how this can be used to better understand the formation of pidgin languages in the same way that epidemiologists studied the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft to better understand the mechanics of how disease affects human behavior. Video games as an academic lens into peoples' minds has always been a fascinating topic to me, and by the end of this, you'll see why.

First off, message.

So for those not indoctrinated into the series/game, Elden Ring is a big open world game made by From Software, which won game of the year 2022 among some other awards (if you've played it or know anything about it, just skip to the next header). Each player plays as a Tarnished and explores this massive environment called The Lands Between individually, but if another player is walking in the same area that you are, you can see their "ghost" moving through the world, and you can "invade" or "be summoned" into another player's iteration of the world in order to briefly interact with it before returning to your own iteration. This occupies a weird space in between singleplayer and multiplayer, with these heavily limited and kind of random methods of interaction between players, but that's not the most interesting way of communicating with your fellow Tarnished; that title goes to the messages system. You can write a message onto a small stone, and leave it on the ground, and then that little stone with the message on it will have a random chance to appear in any player's iteration of the world for them to read. This is a tradition which has been going in From Software's games long since before the inception of Elden Ring, although I'm mostly going to be focusing on the message system of that title, because documenting the history of the 13+ years running Soulsbourne franchise is way too much, even for a nerd like me. The point is that messages are a lot more likely to be seen than any other method of player-to-player interaction, and you can even leave little "gestures" to go with them, where the reader can see your character striking a pose while they read the message. What a neat little mechanic, which definitely doesn't have any hidden layers of depth, and certainly wouldn't spawn an entire emergent system of pseudolinguistics, right?

No message ahead, be wary of mimicry

Well, when I said that messages are written by other players, that was a lie. To make a message, you don't type it out with your keyboard, you select what you want to say, from a big list of preset phrases. It works that way for a lot of reasons, foremost of all as a profanity filter, but also to prevent too many spoilers and maintain atmosphere. The sets of phrases are incredibly limiting, famously requiring players to use weird fake old-english diction in order to express a simple thought (Strong foe ahead, be weary of death. Look carefully ahead, visions of item. Suffering, o suffering, why is it always bad luck? etc). This seems like a limitation which would put a serious damper on anyone trying to actually communicate their thoughts, but gamers are a persistent sort, and have a lot of trouble taking no for an answer. They also have way too much time on their hands, and like to solve puzzles, a terrifying combination of traits, and the perfect one to accidentally create a conlang. With the unexpectedly massive audience that this game picked up on launch, millions of people left messages desperately trying to get something across, and if the game's preset vocabulary didn't contain the phrases to express it, they would forge their own path. Any big fans of linguistic history can already tell the direction that this might be going, as we move on into the next chapter:

Teacher, Liar, Lovable Sort

When the game released, there was chaos. The Lands Between are fraught with hidden passages, deception, and blatant bullshit, and the first kind of players leaving messages tried to helpfully communicate what you could trust, and what you couldn't. This is what the message system was intended for after all, giving advice to your peers, and what many people still use it for today. The second kind of players tried to do the opposite, deliberately leading people to their doom, just because they could. The third, and most numerous sort, were simply awestruck at everything the game had to offer, and left a series of remarks on the beauty and humor of the world. The messages left by each group are pretty easy to differentiate to the trained eye, which is the main feature causing me to point out this division of players. Let's call these groups the teachers, the liars, and the lovable sorts. A teacher can be recognized if their messages suggest something within reason, and being backed up by the peer-review of nearby messages to the same effect. If three messages are all sitting on the ground next to eachother, each saying something along the lines of "seek up, look carefully ahead", then a local collage of teachers are trying to let you know about a secret path ahead leading you up towards a hidden objective. However, a single message next to a bloodstained cliff-edge stating "jumping required ahead" is almost certainly a liar, trying to deceive an unsuspecting player into making a dubious leap. Liars sometimes use slightly simpler grammar than teachers do, being less committed to getting their point across. Wait a minute, linguistic variance based on intent? No no, this is just a video game about fighting monsters, surely such an interesting emergent system wouldn't arise from something like that. Lastly, the lovable sorts have the most ranging grammar, spanning from a simple word such as "dog" (a word used colloquially to describe all creatures, from turtles to dragons), to complex sentences requiring the combination of many phrases. However, a lovable sort can be differentiated by the fact that they merely remark upon the world as it is, instead of trying to offer advice to other players, as a teacher or liar might. Some of their most iconic phrases are "Elden ring ahead", used to sarcastically denote a dead end where a player might have been expecting treasure, "you don't have the right, o, you don't have the right" which indicates a locked door, or the world-famous "try finger, but hole", a phrase which explains itself. The most incredible thing about the words of the lovable sort, is that they all require a little bit of thinking to understand their actual meaning, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes like a second language to you! Wait a minute, a second language?

Message? Wasn't expecting introspection

As time went on, the three main groups of message-writers still kept chugging along, creating new works of writing every day, but advancements in understanding of the game's inner workings allowed these messages to become more and more complex. Compound words started to be formed to represent concepts outside of the preset vocabulary, like "skeleton, house" for coffin, "dung, key" to describe the donkeys accompanying traveling merchants, and "edge, lord" being used to refer to the NPC Ensha, a man wearing flamboyant armor made out of bones who takes himself way too seriously. It's worth noting in this section that for a specific period of time, The Lands Between were overtaken by a horde of messages stating only the words "fort, night". Despite the crude and humorous nature of the entire thing, it was clear to see that the linguistic patterns of the Elden Ring community were evolving into their own beast, far beyond the usages that the developers had intended. Words had shed their original meaning, to instead take up contextual meanings based on how players used them, effectively becoming different words entirely. Depending on how you define this, it's either a microcosm of incredibly fast and severe linguistic drift, or the emergence of a new pidgin or conlang entirely. If you really stretch things, you could almost call the message system of Elden Ring an entirely new language in and of itself.

Well done, victory ahead!

I think that video games are an excellent way to observe human behavior under conditions which are controlled, accelerated, and completely recordable, and this is the closest that we've ever seen to an entire language growing completely from scratch. People are always the same, whether you want to call it instinct or just cyclical tendencies, but normally the formation of a new language can take incredible periods of time, hastened only by tragic events like diaspora or massive losses of cultural knowledge (research what's been happening to Gaelic as a spoken language for more info about this sort of thing, it's kind of depressing but is also important to learn about, and there's a lot of people on this site talking about it who can do the topic way more justice than I can). Even for other topics which either require great passage of time, or great tragedy in order to research (I.E. geology or epidemiology, respectively), there are a lot of simulations and predictive models which can tell us how these systems behave without actually experiencing them. Linguistics has never had this sort of thing...until now, perhaps. Obviously there won't be any academic breakthroughs based on a bunch of people online all writing "rump ahead", but it's an incredibly interesting thing to see happening for a field which is so hard to actively advance, and it could lead to actual scientific methods of generating new languages via human interaction for research purposes. Of course, there's always the sizable chance that this goes nowhere and I just wrote this insane rant because I like to type, but if nothing else, I at the very least exposed some of my mutuals to "try finger, but hole".

Elden ring + SotE lore rambles part 2 electric boogaloo

Spoilers ahead

If you want, my first post was here, its not necessary to read it to understand but it might also interest you.

Alright, so ive been playing the dlc and thinking a lot about Miquella, Marika, godhood and everything. And in my first post, I speculated that the reason Miquella turns out to be the "bad guy" (big quotation marks bc theres not really an actual "good" here cmon guys its fromsoft were talking about) was because the path to godhood required him to fundamentally change as a person.

We do see how much change is required here, Miquella abandons huge parts of himself, both physical and emotional. But the part that interests me here is St Trina specifically. St Trina is a large part of who Miquella once was, shorn away and made into an entirely new person, cast away in Miquella's post to godhood.

Now that got me thinking, bc doesnt that sound familiar to you ? A young empyrean, casting away part of themselves to become a god, and that part becoming an entirely new person of the opposite gender ? Now where have i heard that before...

Oh hi Radagon, what are you doing here ?

Do you see where i'm going here ? The whole Radagon is Marika thing has been a topic of debate for a while now, and i dont want to toot my own horn here but i might have cracked the code.

I think Marika split Radagon from herself on her own path to godhood just as Miquella did with St Trina.

It works pretty well with every aspect of the lore so far. It explains the how in the Radagon is Marika thing, St Trina is somewhat antagonistic towards Miquella just as Radagon and Marika were somewhat antagonistic towards each other, I dont think either Radagon or St Trina are empyreans despite their other halves being so, etc etc. And we do see that St Trina is a whole ass different person which implies Radagon probably was as well.

Anyways damn, like mother like son amirite ?

Also, sorry more Leda posting, the line "Have you been taken in by the plight of the hornsent? Foolish… But hardly unexpected. Man is a compassionate animal, for better or worse." fascinates me so... there's no justification there, if anything she acknowledges that what she's doing in attempting to kill the hornsent is the bad, the non-compassionate thing to do. And from other lines we know she feels empathy, respect, regret, the "weight of one’s deeds"... She may be overly paranoid and violent and murderous, but it's not that she's without emotion, she's just capable of entirely steeling herself against those emotions. She'll carry those burdens willingly, Miquella's dogged blade, so he needn't sully his hands.

Although at the same time... she's so arrogant about all of it, to presume she knows Miquella's will better than anyone else! She has the authority to say who is or isn't undeserving of serving under him, and she has the power to execute the ones she judges dangerous. When I honestly can't imagine that Miquella, at least previously to shedding everything that made him himself, would've approved of any of that. She would never betray him, true, but there's a reason he still put a charm on her as well (and I kinda have to wonder what the reason he kept her around at all was...)

Uhhhhh- so anyways-

Age Headcanons for SOTE NPCs; A Senseless List

A reminder that this is purely for fun and makes no claim for or against canon. This is merely a collection of headcanons and vague vibes, enjoy.

Leda: For this post, let's count biological age and not weird-resurection-ages. To me, Leda seems to be around 25-28. Old enough to have lost her naivety for the world, but young enough to keep the pedestal she's placed Miquella upon. She's an adult, sure, but I'd hardly say she's reached her full abilities. If Miquella had succeeded, she certainly would have matured into a vicious killer with decades of battle experience.

Freyja: This redmane has left her years of doe-eyes and frilly bows long behind. She's an easy 38, cool and confident in her body and her lifestyle. Sure, she's noticed the faint lines that have started to form on her brow but- eh- who cares? She'll keep doing what she's always done. To her, age really is just a number.

Dryleaf Dane: The martial arts know no age limit. 20, 30, 60- only the dedication of the mind and body matters in the pursuit of perfection. Dane has seen it all in his eventful 50-ish years of life, and his fighting style reflects that. It's his reserved demeanor and silent loyalty that make him a perfect balance for the cynical Leda. To whom he likens himself as both a friend and mentor. Honestly, he appreciates her youthful fervor and often finds himself considering her something like a daughter.

The Hornsent: He's 40. 40 what? Just 40, as far as he'd ever tell you anyhow. A trusting man he is not, even with the simplicities of sharing one's true age. Such pointless talking points are for truer friends and family, of which the hornsent has none. Perhaps under the guidance of Kindly Miquella, he might one day celebrate another year of life lived in vengeance. For now, however, the memory only fills him with a deep and singular loneliness...

Igon: Drake Warriors aren't known for living long lives, and hunters of all kinds are known for it even less. Igon is the exception. Without the magics of the land of shadow, he would be about 42. An impressive age to reach, for one in his line of work. Although the lack of care he gives to his own appearance would lead one to believe he was much older.

Sir Ansbach: GILF lovers rejoice, this man is easily the oldest npc on our list today. I would say Ansbach is dutifully vague about his true age. While it may amuse him to give the true number, and watch the flicker of awe for his agility cross his companions' face, he remains aware that giving his real age is a disadvantage should things turn south. On one hand, it may cause him to be targeted by those unaware of his skill. An easy problem to solve, if not overly tiresome. On the other, it endangers on a more... emotional level. He cannot risk his allies putting his safety over their own on such a baseless reason as his advanced age. He is SIR Ansbach, after all. What sort of man, as both mentor and knight, could abide by such an obvious danger to his juniors? Not he, that is certain, and so his many decades remain a mystery (although they certainly number more than Dane's)

Thiollier: Awkward, skinny, and chronically anxious. Thiollier reads as young, very young. He's most certainly the baby of the group, even if most of the others don't treat him differently for it. After all, they must likely assume him only a few years younger than Leda. They all began their lives as warriors, scholars, and missionaries at a similar age. So to them it matters very little how old their resident perfumer is. Freyja assumes he is 22, the Hornsent suspects him little older than 17, and only the Tarnished and Sir Ansbach know he is - truthfully- somewhere in between.

Moore: It is difficult to place Moore, since he is kin to the Pests and therefore likely a different race/species category for biological age. However, I would say that Moore is somewhat youthful, based upon his naivety. Likely, he is in between Thiollier and Leda in age - when the years between Pest kin and Tarnished are converted. Mid-20s seems an appropriate range for Moore.

Aaaannnd that's all I have for now! If you have different headcanons on sote npc ages, or npc headcanons in general, pls feel free to share! I love reading comments and seeing different (and similar) perspectives on Elden Ring characters!

Anyways, thanks for reading! This was a fun way to kill time lol >D