[Artfight 2023] [14]

Sometimes you've gotta take received wisdom in tabletop RPG design and do the exact opposite on purpose, just to see what happens. I've got a vaguely superhero-adjacent RPG I'm working on right now that flips the whole "the player characters' actions should never result in an NPC's death unless that was their explicit intention" thing turnways and makes it literally impossible to engage in physical coercion of any kind toward another person without some non-zero likelihood of accidentally killing the target in the process, and let me tell you, it's resulted in some fun "okay, how are we going to do this" conversations.

Here's my love, abandoned.

Krang infection 26

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My favorite nudibranch photos from @kamata_yosuke on ig

'art idea that's above your skill set' and 'writing idea that's above your skill set' are tortures I wish upon absolutely no one man

Soulsborne Final Bosses poorly explained

Dark Souls: God is senile, forcibly retire him.

Dark Souls 2: Lich King Cersei Lannister tricked you into doing her dirty work or Treebeard with the One Ring beats your ass.

Dark Souls 3: Parry all you want, you can’t parry the feels.

Sekiro: Swordsman hatches from grandson, shoots you in face.

Bloodborne: Local paraplegic regains use of legs specifically to kick your ass. Failing that, the moon does it for him.

Elden Ring: Kill God’s malesona and pet amoeba.

POV you dropped your camera

guy after having a completely normal social interaction: i made things weird again and they hate me

I love how Mushi-shi (the anime) depicts chronic illness through the paranormal and abstract. Ginko is literally a medicine man, and his clientele are closer to suffering an affliction than experiencing a haunting. He doesn't "exorcise the demons through prayer;" he treats the condition the person is suffering from, which often involves removing the mushi, but sometimes they need to be lived with, and sometimes even a successful treatment can leave lasting damage from the time the mushi resided in the person's body. It's the best depiction of chronic illness I've seen portrayed through an abstract lense. I'm not even learning anything about myself or my life by watching it; I just understand and appreciate each case the show portrays. Part of what sets it apart is that Mushi-shi is very good at depicting the emotional toll of chronic illness without moralizing it. Sometimes chronically ill people die of depression from their conditions, sometimes after you're cured you miss or take joy in certain elements of the disease, having a friend play with you in quarantine is invaluable for your spirit but comes at the deadly risk of contagion. I'm only 4 episodes in but it's really resonating with me. Teenage chronically ill me definitely couldn't handle this show, but 25 year old me loves it.

one of the important cornerstones of fandom is understanding that your headcanon is not everyone else's headcanon, and i'm not sure when people stopped understanding this