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TheDoomkitten posted:(I'm biased enough to spend $5 on a title to make my point, what can I say.) I've been ruminating on this (your av's text) and considering whether to post my thoughts on it or not and then I looked to SA's emojis.  Well poo poo alright here we go: I believe Angela in fact did do something wrong, both in the technical sense and (imo) moral sense. While we may never know if Ayin's Seed of Light plan would have actually worked or not for sure, what Angela did definitely threw a wrench into the works and caused more harm than good in the end (such as the Pianist, who has been marked as a clear result of the days of darkness) for her own personal gain. In Lob Corp Angela can absolutely be considered the real antagonist in end, and also succeeds at her plan! Which is a refreshing change of pace for any story imo, one of the reasons I really like Lob Corp's plot. That all said, I also believe that what Angela did was something well within her rights, and was even totally natural considering all the poo poo Ayin put her through. She is completely and totally a sympathetic character who suffered far above and beyond what any sentient, sapient being should. The only reason Angela didn't descend into madness and insanity was because Angela is an AI whose design is based off a human, and not actually human. We even get helpful context for what would happen to actual humans stuck in limbo unable to do anything for thousands of years at a time thanks to the Library and W Corp's lovely trains, which was also clear contrast to how inhuman Angela actually was as an AI. Especially considering the, uh, marked difference in actual time frame from what Angela had to deal with vs the passengers on the train. It's what makes Angela such a great character and (ultimately) great villain in the first game, her motive and justification make so much sense it's practically impossible she wouldn't do what she did. This of course makes Ayin look like even more of a dumbass, though you could (try to) charitably say he was just the kind of person who couldn't see the forest for the trees. It's of course even better since Angela actually succeeds in her plan as well, giving both herself (and the player) the catharsis of sticking it to A at just the right moment. I'm also of the opinion it's incredibly ironic that what Angela did is very much in line with the MO of life in The City, despite her total lack of knowledge and experience about it. Just some good ol' gently caress you, got mine and it's just fantastic.  I could type way more about what I think is going on with the Realizations and Angela's journey in LoR but this post is already Too Long so I'll leave it at that.
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Jul 4, 2022 23:16
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It is very funny to me that for a bunch of Librarians they don’t know their literature. Der Freischütz 7 magic bullets don’t actually do what Yesod talks about. The first 6 bullets hit whatever you aim at perfectly, never missing. But the seventh belongs to Samiel the Black Huntsman, the Devil, and hits whoever he desires. In the actual play Max the Huntsman is tricked into a deal with Samiel by Kaspar, as Kaspar wants to hold off paying his own soul to devil and is jealous that Agatha the daughter of the head forester loves Max. Max needs to win a shooting contest to attain her hand in marriage, and during the contest makes 3 perfect shots with the magic bullets. Kaspar shoots the same Fox 3 times, and so the seventh bullet to be fired is the next one Max has. In effect it would kill Agatha when fired, if not for the intervention of a local priestly hermit, deflecting the cursed bullet into Kaspar himself. Of course, the version of Der Freischütz that exists in the city might well be different, if I remember the abnormality details from Lobotomy Corporation.
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Jul 4, 2022 23:48
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Lord_Magmar posted:It is very funny to me that for a bunch of Librarians they don’t know their literature. Der Freischütz 7 magic bullets don’t actually do what Yesod talks about. Whether the Librarians know the original play or not is kinda irrelevant: they're talking about the Freischütz in front of them, firing bullets they have seen in action.
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Jul 4, 2022 23:54
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Lord_Magmar posted:It is very funny to me that for a bunch of Librarians they don’t know their literature. Der Freischütz 7 magic bullets don’t actually do what Yesod talks about.
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Jul 5, 2022 00:02
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NullBlack posted:Whether the Librarians know the original play or not is kinda irrelevant: they're talking about the Freischütz in front of them, firing bullets they have seen in action. It does if Yesod says he knows the story of Der Freischütz. I just thought it was a funny detail and wanted to share the basic outline of the original play. Because it’s something of a pet love of mine at this point, between how cool the abnormality is in Project Moon and my one of my favourite Yugioh Archetypes being based on it. RandomReader posted:It's not either version, cause the abno wasn't about focus or a specific target in any respect. He rather explicitly had no specific target, just impulse killings with no goal in mind. I went and checked, the Lobotomy Corp abnormality version is in fact, the Devil tells the Hunstman that the gun fires magical bullets that will hit whatever target the huntsman pleases, but the seventh will kill his beloved. The Huntsman then shot all his loved ones, praised the devil’s accuracy “These Magic Bullets really will hit their target as you say”, then firing the seventh bullet which hits the Huntsman himself. Then he goes on the mindless rampage. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 00:04
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So, blind watchers, what do you make of the terms "Smiling Faces" and "8 O'clock Circus"?
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Jul 5, 2022 00:07
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Junpei posted:So, blind watchers, what do you make of the terms "Smiling Faces" and "8 O'clock Circus"? 8 O'clock Circus was mentioned by Wedge office, as one they just fought and who destroyed one of Pamel*s body. So, I expect it to be third node, Smiling faces will be second then. Bringing up all TQ voting hints and doing some analysis I get: Smiling Faces: Eat the rich. That's popular these days, right? Given how smoothly that went… I'm going to turn this one down as well. I was gonna fight Abnos, but then I got high. It was a nice smoke break, but back to the grind for us both, yes?  8 O'clock Circus: I'd bet all my chips on it in a heartbeat. I'd bet all my chips on it in a heartbeat. Not Train There shouldn't be any more Mr.s Monkeying around with the polls anymore for a while. Or how about this one, the best Key Page in the entire tier is right here! I see you decided not to listen to me at all. That's… unfortunate Codependency can lead to some weird places. I think we've sort of forgotten what 'difficulty' truly means. Clowns. And I realized there wasn't any reason to say something when there was an Abnormality available. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Reasoning: Clowns definetly belongs to Circus, so Faces are getting high. Two later hints points to smoking, which goes nicely with getting high. Eat the Rich goes to Smiling faces due to difficulty, so codependency is in Circus. And turning difficulty down will have to point to Faces too. The high/smoking argument is weak, so the last two hints could be reversed. From that I see Smiling Faces as some kind of Anarcho-Syndicate (Unless Eat the Rich is literal.... in the City you can never be sure), who probably use perfomance enhancing drugs in fight. And 8 O'Clock Circus... is a circus. Probably we will have to fight some animals (or people posing as animals).
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Jul 5, 2022 01:19
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The 8 O'clock Circus has actually been mentioned before!
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Jul 5, 2022 01:26
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Lord_Magmar posted:Yugioh Archetypes
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Jul 5, 2022 01:34
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Evil Kit posted:fantastic thoughts All goofs aside, this is very close to my real train of thought; it's just hard to fit a thesis like this into a 500 character maximum so "Angela did nothing wrong" had to do. However I think there IS another important factor at play here that you have to consider. We don't know the exact correlation between "the Seed of Light is fully spread" and "the Sephirah and Angela shut down" is, but from what I could tell the implication is that they all had some built-in functionality that turns them off as soon as the Seed of Light project has been fully completed. Even if that isn't true, which to be fair is a real possibility and I'm forgetting some crucial information here, at the end of the day throwing a wrench into the script *somehow* was LITERALLY a matter of life and death for Angela. If it went off without a hitch, then she would've shut down only knowing those million years of torment. Stealing the Light was a fundamentally selfish thing to do, since we know her plan was to use it to become fully human, and she probably also knew there would be some kind of consequence for her actions if not the specifics of it... but "sacrifice yourself for the greater good" is an awful choice to put on someone, let alone doing it under the assumption that it wasn't a choice in the first place. Like you said, Angela's actions ultimately reflect the philosophy of the City on a grand scale. She basically said, "that's that, and this is this" to the suffering of the people in the City that she had the ability to stop vs. how Ayin personally hosed her over for a million years from her point of view. She screwed over so many people, but putting aside the question of what she's doing in Library of Ruina since turning people into books is distinctly less morally complex and is unquestionably a dick move, is it really fair at ALL to say that she should've laid down and died quietly after all the suffering she went through? Stealing the Light was ultimately "wrong," but so were the circumstances that put her in that position in the first place. I legit don't have an actual answer to this question other than my personal opinion which is "yeah she was fully justified go girlboss" since these are all fictional characters and I like it when women do morally questionable things, but the questions that have all been provoked here are really at the core of Library of Ruina as a whole, imo. It really is Angela Discourse: The Game. Now, putting goofs back on the table from where I put them aside: Angela in fact did absolutely nothing wrong because I personally like it when women dress classy and do things that provoke pages and pages of discourse, and I think it's good when stories do that. TheDoomkitten fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 02:41
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Dog Kisser posted:I feel like this is probably already a term but I want to live in a world where I'm just now watching this phrase being born in the wild. It's a technically incorrect term for the way Yugioh designs sets of cards. Elemental HERO is an "archetype", as is Ancient Gear, and the one I'm talking about is Magical Musket. In Library of Ruina it would be stuff like how there are obvious deck combos themed around the specific factions. Like how Singleton is so far themed around the Prescripts and the Index. You could call Singleton the "Prescript/Index" archetype. Earlier, when people were doing Library of Ruina themed Yugioh cards that would be the "Library of Ruina" Archetype for Yugioh. Or whatever other name was used. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 02:50
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Junpei posted:So, blind watchers, what do you make of the terms "Smiling Faces" and "8 O'clock Circus"? Smiling Faces: Happy good times for everyone involved, big smiles all around (but not the kind of big smiles that clowns have) 8 O'clock Circus: Probably involves clowns. I hate clowns. No one actually likes clowns. Where do they even come from? What actually compels people to decide that they want to be clowns? It's not just something that happens one day, there are actual clown schools for god's sake! What deep, insidious character flaws lead someone down this path? And what deranged individual decides to follow through with their depraved impulses? Why do they do it? What do they get out of it? It's not money or power. Contempt and humiliation? Some kind of degenerate perversion turned into a sickening display for all to see? Who can tell what goes on behind that makeup and that wig? What dreams of chronic and sustained cruelty? Anyway gently caress clowns.
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Jul 5, 2022 03:04
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To put it in much simpler terms, Angela's actions were evil, but the circumstances do not make her a villain.
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Jul 5, 2022 03:04
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Of the outfits so far, I think Hornet is my favourite one. The components of it are all incredibly goofy on its own, but... I think she manages to look nice in spite of all that? I think a couple of the other outfit looks better overall like Der Shooty, but it's the 'should look completely ridiculous, but doesn't to me' elevates Hornet. In terms of Angela discourse, my view is that she didn't really do anything wrong at the outset with the Seed of Light plan disruption. If you don't want someone to gently caress up your plans, don't make it literally a matter of life or death for her. It's completely justified there. She's definitely doing some pretty nasty poo poo throughout Library of Ruina, but... it's still more fair than anything else in the city? Like, gameplay wise, if you lose, you straight up lose the books you put up on offer, so the implication is that they take the books and leave. While it'll quickly become an explosion writing mess for the writing to have to account for the losses, canonically we don't lose. But.... if you do lose, the deal will be fulfilled and they'd take their books home. The element in writing that still makes me sympathetic is that she clearly has no idea what she's doing. She's following the will of the invitations, because while she definitely wants to make her own decisions, she... has next to no experience with it. So, unfortunately she's stuck in a bit of a slave mentality still. And she's still stuck in the library, she can't actually leave, so she's taking the course of action that attempts to earn her freedom. All the decisions that are available to her are basically to empower herself while closing her eyes to the suffering of others. She's repeating a lot of her learned patterns and trying to make the best decisions that she can from those available to her. So... it's very human in that respect, which certainly makes her fascinating. I wouldn't want to be around her, especially because of the collateral damage, but I certainly wouldn't want to be around 90% of the cast of the Project Mooniverse people, on the basis that most of them suck. But it remains that she's very fascinating to observe, and I was wishing to see her get her best result as I went through the story, whatever that would be.
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Jul 5, 2022 03:05
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Keldulas posted:Of the outfits so far, I think Hornet is my favourite one. The components of it are all incredibly goofy on its own, but... I think she manages to look nice in spite of all that? I think a couple of the other outfit looks better overall like Der Shooty, but it's the 'should look completely ridiculous, but doesn't to me' elevates Hornet. +1 to all of this, I mostly focused on the stealing the Light thing in my post but this is pretty much my view too, with the exception that Angela admits at the very start that guests don't get invitations unless they are guaranteed to choose them, so the element of free choice that's involved is... fuzzy. But you're correct in that the Library is, ultimately, much more fair than a lot of the City, in that it'll actually follow up on its deal with you and you can hypothetically win and/or escape rather than the game being rigged from the start.
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Jul 5, 2022 03:12
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TheDoomkitten posted:cool thoughts IMO all the major arguments over whether what Angela is doing is right or wrong, justified or not, etc would basically just boil down to some of the usual, uh, philosophical(?) arguments. The "needs of one vs needs of many", the Trolley Problem, whether or not AI are living beings in the traditional sense of the word. If you want to be meme-y Angela is basically Butterbot and all the questions/arguements that entails. You could pick any of those and go ham with it if you wanted to, but tbh I think it's cool to just enjoy the story as it unfolds and see what other people think of it from their perspective as they post. It's why I've stayed quiet most of the time ShyGuy1231 posted:To put it in much simpler terms, Angela's actions were evil, but the circumstances do not make her a villain. I disagree. By many typical definitions a villain's actions are selfish and disregard the wellbeing of others. It's why she was and continues to be a good one, just in LoR she's the protagonist as well. However just because someone is a villain doesn't mean you can't root for them!
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Jul 5, 2022 03:21
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TheDoomkitten posted:Like you said, Angela's actions ultimately reflect the philosophy of the City on a grand scale. She basically said, "that's that, and this is this" to the suffering of the people in the City that she had the ability to stop vs. how Ayin personally hosed her over for a million years from her point of view. She screwed over so many people, but putting aside the question of what she's doing in Library of Ruina since turning people into books is distinctly less morally complex and is unquestionably a dick move, is it really fair at ALL to say that she should've laid down and died quietly after all the suffering she went through? Stealing the Light was ultimately "wrong," but so were the circumstances that put her in that position in the first place. I legit don't have an actual answer to this question other than my personal opinion which is "yeah she was fully justified go girlboss" since these are all fictional characters and I like it when women do morally questionable things, but the questions that have all been provoked here are really at the core of Library of Ruina as a whole, imo. It really is Angela Discourse: The Game.
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Jul 5, 2022 05:29
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GilliamYaeger posted:The 8 O'clock Circus has actually been mentioned before! They're not the only ones. TeeQueue posted:
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Jul 5, 2022 05:42
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…I don’t see a way out of this… I heard even the Smiling Faces are involved…
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RandomReader posted:Imo, it really depends on the effect of cutting off the seeding early had on the Distortion Phenomenon. There was no guarantee that people would use the potential of the light for good, wholesome things, so if the effect of the interruption was minimal, then it's pretty quid pro quo on loving over lob corp after they hosed her over. If it did cause a significant increase over a continuous shining of the light, then no, Angela has no excuse for making her problem with Ayin and to an extent everyone at Lob corp, the City's problem as a whole. Again, the Pianist single handedly murdered 80% of District 9, and he's not the only instance of the distortions, running around killing people. If Angela's actions made poo poo like this more likely, there's no amount of "gently caress you I want to live" that justifies the deaths of all these people not responsible for her crummy life. Your post kind of gets to the crux of it. We have to remember that the LobCorp plan was vague as gently caress. We certainly didn't know what it actually meant at the end of the LobCorp game, merely that it was meant to shine over the city to do...... something. Her interference certainly caused the Distortion phenomenon to happen, but there's really no way to have known that it would've happened like that. The City can certainly be angry at her for the consequences, but that's sort of a judgement in hindsight. They'd be fully justified in wanting to kill her, but she was also perfectly justified in taking action to preserve her own life when the consequences were so vague in the first place.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:01
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Evil Kit posted:That all said, I also believe that what Angela did was something well within her rights, and was even totally natural considering all the poo poo Ayin put her through. thematically, ayin's plan was pretty much always doomed to failure. the disease of the human mind or however the games called it is defined by people denying their own emotions and desires in order to just follow orders and expectations to survive another day. while carmen was alive people ostensibly joined her of their own volition, but after ayin took over and formed his plan to create a wing, that was no longer the case. the sephirah were too busy being dead to have any input on becoming boxbot and ayin scripted out which emotions they were required to feel for his plan. while in TeeQueue's retelling the agents were remarkably independent, in gameplay terms they have little to no agency and no idea what they're working towards, effectively being extensions of the manager's desires to the exclusion of their own and even dying pointlessly if ordered to. and of course there's angela discourse ayin cared about supporting carmen, but he never shared her goal. as binah puts it, he's the platonic ideal of cityfolk, so his plan to free the human will required denying human will at every turn for ten thousand years. his plan being ruined because someone actually exercised their human will for the first time is the kinda dramatic irony it had to end on
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Jul 5, 2022 06:11
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Yeah, the thing about Ayin's plan is that it was always bad, and the fact that Angela ruins it at the last minute is just proof of that fact. Just gonna go and create an android with free will but then forbid her from ever exercising it and also treat her like garbage and then also hand her literally all the power in making sure my plan comes to fruition, what could possibly go wrong. Plus the fact that the whole thing was basically "we're going to fix humanity's problems by committing so many atrocities it overflows the evil meter and makes it wrap around to good".
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Jul 5, 2022 06:21
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Keldulas posted:Your post kind of gets to the crux of it. We have to remember that the LobCorp plan was vague as gently caress. We certainly didn't know what it actually meant at the end of the LobCorp game, merely that it was meant to shine over the city to do...... something. I believe they were trying to cure the depression/resigned acceptance thing where people don't really even dream that The City could be better, it's just How Things Are. ... and it wouldn't have loving worked because they weren't doing anything about the power structures that are enforcing this, instead just doing the magic equivalent of giving everybody some happy pills for a week. I mean, we learned that the Sweepers aren't some random thing in the Backstreets the Head doesn't care about : the Head granted them a patent. The Head wants them there. The City isn't a hellhole because people have depression, it's a hellhole because the Head wants it to be. Carmen and Ayin were trying to treat the symptom rather than the cause. a cartoon duck posted:thematically, ayin's plan was pretty much always doomed to failure. the disease of the human mind or however the games called it is defined by people denying their own emotions and desires in order to just follow orders and expectations to survive another day.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:21
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I feel like at this point someone could probably make an alignment chart, but all the entries are Angela quotes/actions from various points in the games she's in. This in turn makes Angela have something in common with Batman, which is awesome.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:23
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Probably not amazing, but I wanted to put it down.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:38
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Junpei posted:Probably not amazing, but I wanted to put it down. i am the entire chaotic column here, baby
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Jul 5, 2022 06:52
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I lean toward Chaotic Neutral Angela there on the chart. You go girl, Team Angela for life. This discourse is fun to read in between excellent LP updates.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:53
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anyways as one of the catalysts of the newest tsunami of angela discourse i should probably throw my two cents in on the newest turn the discussion has taken. like other people have pointed out, it's unfair to judge angela on the basis of the extent of the distortion phenomenon or anything that came as an indirect cause of her actions that she couldn't have predicted, especially since we don't know for sure what the light was actually planned to do. based on current evidence i think it's fair to say that it was supposed to cause mass e.g.o. manifestation to truly challenge the head judging from philip's reaction to the library and the incompleteness of the seed turned that into distortion, but we don't know for sure since ayin took the details of the plan to his grave and the sephirah took it on faith that he had the best intentions in mind and that Everything Was Going To Be Just Fine. i think it boils down to that, on some level, the destruction of district 9 can be blamed on angela's decision, it isn't really angela's fault once you get down to brass tacks. a lot of the way people make choices in the city as a whole, not just angela, ends up in this complicated mess of causality where one person trying to survive by default makes things worse for everyone else because the head has designed this system to be a zero-sum game that ruthlessly grinds everyone down. stealing the light is a macrocosm of the choices that people have to deal with every day, whether that means passively living in the limited space of a nest taking up resources that could vastly improve the lives of people in the backstreets or tearing out some poor schmuck's guts because if you don't the bigger, badder thugs will do much worse things to your own corpse. all of these decisions, to some extent, are the "wrong" thing to do, but while the individual has some level of culpability for them the entity that made the structures that forced these decisions in the first place has as much, if not a larger part of the blame, whether that is the head designing the city to be a total shithole from the top down or ayin deciding that everything takes the umpteenth priority compared to carmen's dream and his own regrets. it's hard to be selfless in a situation where doing the selfless thing either makes your own life immeasurably worse or outright ends it, and asking everyone to be martyrs in the cause of Being Kind and Making The World A Better Place is ALSO terrible which is all just restating poo poo that's already been brought up, but i mainly wanted to point out that angela discourse is good, actually. the Dialectic around angela propels us forward in the understanding of the game and the themes that it's trying to communicate, since angela is pretty central to it, and i KNOW that this is hard to take seriously given my current title but getting too attached to whether she did the right or wrong thing is what gets people frustrated imo. (i am just a perpetual 8lue 8itch apologist so i had to snipe the obvious joke.) she's a game character, it's impossible for her to do "right" or "wrong" and it's a lot more interesting to examine what the story implies about her rightness and wrongness and how that ties into what it's trying to communicate anyways it's midnight and i'm going to bed, my apologies if this all sounds like nonsense lmao TheDoomkitten fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 07:05
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The key to understanding the lively dialectics is simple, really
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Jul 5, 2022 07:56
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MetaMeme posted:The key to understanding the lively dialectics is simple, really That is amazing and also worrying because I’m familiar with the discourse around all four of those characters.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:10
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a cartoon duck posted:thematically, ayin's plan was pretty much always doomed to failure. the disease of the human mind or however the games called it is defined by people denying their own emotions and desires in order to just follow orders and expectations to survive another day. while carmen was alive people ostensibly joined her of their own volition, but after ayin took over and formed his plan to create a wing, that was no longer the case. Ayin didn't form his plan to become a Wing until after Garion's raid, and no one from Carmen's original team followed Ayin (except for Benjamin, but Benjamin joined to follow Ayin in the first place and doesn't seem to ever have cared for Carmen's project all that much), because everyone but A and B from the original team were dead from the aforementioned raid. Those who came after didn't join the secret plan to save humanity, they joined Lobotomy Corporation, energy company and one of the Wings of the World. The only ones who knew of the company's true purpose were Ayin, Benjamin, Angela and (once resurrected as a boxbot) Binah.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:14
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Angela Discourse is good, I like Angela Discourse. And this is the best place to have it, besides.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:15
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MetaMeme posted:The key to understanding the lively dialectics is simple, really Just had to give this one the nod because I have been going deep on a Homestuck reread (by way of liveblogs) this past week, and lemme tell you: The Vriska vibes on Angela are immaculate. As for the more classically on-topic portion of my post: The final segment of this fight is a really neat slew of quick back-to-back mechanical tests, although I wish some of them tested / encouraged other responses rather than just clean clashing. Watching it get semi-derailed was also very interesting, design-wise.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:43
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Let us be careful so that the ironic Homestuck discourse does not become unironic Homestuck discourse.
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Jul 5, 2022 09:06
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Ariamaki posted:Just had to give this one the nod because I have been going deep on a Homestuck reread (by way of liveblogs) this past week, and lemme tell you: The Vriska vibes on Angela are immaculate. I dread the thought of a Vriska Reception. She'd have all of the Light. All of it.
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Jul 5, 2022 09:07
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Dog Kisser posted:I feel like this is probably already a term but I want to live in a world where I'm just now watching this phrase being born in the wild. A card game, about figures drawn from a shared memory of tales and similar? Library of Ruina : Yung-i-oh?
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Jul 5, 2022 09:08
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MetaMeme posted:The key to understanding the lively dialectics is simple, really Vriska (Vriska)
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Jul 5, 2022 09:29
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A bit of a topic swerve, but I do want to talk about how, mechanics wise, Solemn Lament is absolutely busted. It's a ranged attack, so it's not hard to aim it right and just hit it on a die where you're not clashing with it, so the enemy can't fight back. At base, without modification, it's 1-6 damage x 8. Which results in 8-48 damage by the rolls. Now, it does an alternating 3 HP/SR damage, so an uncontested volley is 20-60 damage. That's already fair enough damage unmodified for a 4 cost. Now, let's talk about the current passives. We can use Yujin for a chassis, with her +1 global power, add +1 blunt, and give her singular strike because the page only shows 1 die for +2 power. So +4 power turns it into 5-10 damage per shot for 40-80 damage, and 52-92 damage after the card's add-on. Plus Yujin would refund 2 light after that. Now let's start adding in the abno cards. Request for 3-5 damage per shot makes the physical damage 76-132 damage after everything. I'll like to note at this point that a lot of the regular key pages have like 70-80 health at this point if that. You can add Violence if you wanted an additional 24 damage on the max there, it's not guarenteed to be there especially as a Red card. Plus the Bind and Paralysis on Blunt with Metallic Ringing on the other main choice is just so handy. Hello Chained Wrath or Musical Addiction (though this one will likely not occur unless you're ailing. But it'll certainly help the recovery). 1-3 more? Sure! Let's make that 84-156. If for some ungodly reason, they survive long enough to get to the 3rd tier abno cards, let's just slap in Dark Flame. 100-188. Bonus points, they can't possibly have a Blunt resistance at this point. Yesod can ramp this damage even harder with some later keypages. But.... I feel it's good to illustrate that even out of the box here, he's just set to do some murder with this new poo poo.
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Jul 5, 2022 09:33
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 Music YesodBattle01 YesodBattle02 YesodBattle03 YesodStory Abnormality Pages Level 1       With Yesod in particular, our team is likely to be winning clashes and thus will wind up in the 0 to +2 territory. Given that, Request is an instant-pick any time that we want to farm books, and otherwise is completely ignorable. In the event we don't want Request for some reason, Metallic Ringing's position ensures that on a +1 or +2 our selection is from it and the other two Awakening pages, and since Yesod is a floor that wants Blunt pages it being easy to pick is very helpful. From there, continued success would give us a choice between Repetitive Pattern-Recognition or Lament, both options being very powerful. If things don't go as well and we hit 0, then our second pick would include Rhythm for a sudden Strength boost, and if things go wrong then there's always Violence! It's not quite as good now that pages with a 1 minimum are rare, but there are still very few times when you wouldn't want to use Violence given the option. Level 2       Level 2 for Yesod is a bit strange, but there are some clear winners. Hitting +1 overall (simple enough for Yesod) will give us the option to pick Clean, which is a straight +3 Power in the right circumstances and frequently at least worth a +1 Power. It's very strong, especially when combined with Metallic Ringing's Binds. If we don't hit that +1 when going to Floor Level 3, then we have an interesting choice in Recharge, Chained Wrath, and either The Seventh Bullet or Eternal Rest. This is a rather spicy choice to have to make—Chained Wrath can tank the Emotion Level gains of the person who grabs it, and Eternal Rest/The Seventh Bullet are situationally useful at best. This can lead to picking up Recharge by default for most of the game, though we'll eventually transition over to wanting to grab Chained Wrath no matter what once we see a few more passives. If things go south, then The Seventh Bullet will not save you—small amounts of scratch damage in failed clashes isn't likely to win us a battle—but Musical Addiction might. Yesod tends to run offensive pages, and thus the downside of it isn't really a downside at all, and the 1-3 bonus Power can win clashes that we otherwise wouldn't and get things back on track. Level 3    Yesod's Level 3 Abnormality Pages are very simple, in that we pick the one that best applies to the situation when we get there. -If fighting a single enemy with a low number of Speed Dice and lots of HP, pick Coffin. -If fighting one or more enemies with Endured/Ineffective Resistances, pick Dark Flame -Else, pick Music. You will never pick Music. E.G.O.  Regret is really expensive for a single-target page, but in exchange for that, we get a powerful Blunt attack that deals an incredible amount of Stagger damage. It feels overcosted to me, but I also can't really argue with the results of lopping off nearly 60% of an enemy's SR in a single page. Best used against enemies with large SR pools, otherwise I'd probably pick something else.  Grinder is a perfectly serviceable Individual Mass Attack, which can destroy entire pages from multiple enemies at once if we stack enough power on top of it. It being Slashing makes it a good pick for Bamboo-hatted Kim builds, and Clean allows us to get an additional boost by targeting a lower-speed die with it as well. Individual Mass Attacks tend to be much better for dealing raw damage than Summation Mass Attacks due to how Power scales with more dice, so I really like this page overall—though unlike Summation attacks, it does require some thought as to when it's best used.  Harmony is… situational. Spending 5 Light for 5 total attacks isn't particularly bad, and this can lead to some very high Strength spikes. If we hit an enemy 5 times with it, then there will be 5 bonus Strength spread out among our team, and if we defeat an enemy with the last hit then all allies get an additional 2 Strength on top of it. Use it to close out enemies, and it'll give a massive power swing that'll make following up even easier… though outside of a boss fight with a number of weaker adds like Tomerry this is generally a redundant effect.  Lament… Lament is infamous for being one of the best E.G.O pages in the game, and for good reason. At a 4 cost it's cheaper than most of Yesod's options, and it gives a single die that's rolled 8 times regardless of circumstances. This die is only a 1-6 Blunt, but it's also a 1-6 Blunt on Yesod's floor. All of Yesod's power stacking tricks apply to it, be it Clean, Chained Wrath, Violence, or even the Puppet passive or the other passives which give bonus damage/stagger to Blunt attacks. It works well with Metallic Ringing as well, able to lay on up to 8 Paralysis by itself. It's very powerful, and before the game's done we'll definitely see its full potential.  Lastly, there's Magic Bullet, our first Synchronize E.G.O. Synchronize E.G.O are relatively small combat pages which then transform the Librarian into a special mode for three turns afterwards. During this transformation, they keep all of the HP/SR/Resistances/Passives of their current Key Page, but their deck is replaced entirely, a new 5-page hand is drawn, and they're given a way to deactivate the transformation afterwards. As such, it's impossible to properly discuss Magic Bullet without looking at its deck.  Firstly, Der Shooty has a trio of Magic Bullet in its deck. This page is a handy Light restoration page, and it's got a single decent ranged die. As far as light regeneration goes, this is an upgraded, Pierce version of Draw of the Sword.  The next page is Silent Bullet, which Der Shooty runs at 2. This is another large single-die page like Headshot or Aiming for Bullseye, but its effect is much better: Sealing an entire Speed Die of the target on the next turn. This opens up a point of attack for the entire team on the next turn, letting us pour on one-sided attacks while also preventing the enemy's offense. It works especially well with…   Mass Attacks.  Der Shooty has a trio of Mass Attacks, two Inevitable Bullet and a Flooding Bullets. Flooding is probably too costly unless we can find a way to stack 3 or so Power onto it, but Inevitable is very well priced for what it does, letting us have a cheap and reliable Mass Attack. It's very easy to open up a helpless die in an enemy with Silent Bullet, and then follow up by targeting it with one of these MAs for guaranteed damage.  Lastly, Desynchronize is a pair of Block dice that will forcibly end the transformation early, in the event that your opponent suddenly has an immunity to Pierce damage or something. It exists. Ultimately, Magic Bullet is the sort of E.G.O that needs to have a dedicated Librarian to use. It gets much better when paired with things like Wedge and Singular Strike, and the ability to spam Mass Attacks for 2-3 turns out of every 4 is deceptively powerful. It really demands a specific sort of deckbuilding, as well: any Librarian regularly picking up the GUN doesn't have to worry much about their deck's draw power, but Light regeneration will become much more important. As with most options that fundamentally change the balance of deckbuilding, I really like it. Final Thoughts Yesod is a floor that new players gravitate to because he feels very good to play. A couple of positive early interactions snowball into powerful Abnormality Pages that make later clashes into a curbstomp. On top of this he specializes in Blunt pages, something the game really likes giving us right now. His entire playstyle is about grabbing the enemy by the throat, slamming them to the ground, and punching them repeatedly until they can't get up anymore—and he's very good at it. Even when shoved on the backfoot, Yesod's -2 Abnormality Page selections are strong enough to let him get back into the game, and Metallic Ringing alone is enough to pile Paralysis and Bind onto an enemy with reckless abandon, leaving them open so that the floor's Power stacking potential to render them unable to win any clashes no matter how lucky they get. It's very powerful, and as the game goes on we'll get access to a few key passives that change him from a normal wrecking ball to a balance-destroying force of nature. …But that can wait. For now, he's effectively the game's easy mode—just load up Blunt dice and throw massive numbers all over the enemy.  I really like his belt, to be honest. TeeQueue fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 09:38
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Keldulas posted:Your post kind of gets to the crux of it. We have to remember that the LobCorp plan was vague as gently caress. We certainly didn't know what it actually meant at the end of the LobCorp game, merely that it was meant to shine over the city to do...... something. Going "lol, my actions will have 0 consequence on the people we're in the middle of burrowing into the depths of their soul with technology that has previously turned people into monsters who go on murderous rampages" is just willful ignorance. Zereth posted:I believe they were trying to cure the depression/resigned acceptance thing where people don't really even dream that The City could be better, it's just How Things Are. It's not like the seeding didn't also give the people the possibility of the power necessary to have a hope of breaking the cycles and systems, though whether anyone knew is debatable. Philip manifested EGO because of the seeding and became way stronger than he used to be, EGO being something that even an Arbiter of the Head coveted once she understood the possibilities. The Pianist was a loving nobody before distorted because of the white nights and dark days and scarred the city, both from the sheer quantity of people he killed, and from the Musicians of Bremen, who while probably not as proficient, still were an Urban Plague tier missing 3 founding members.
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Jul 5, 2022 09:40
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I pretty much exclusively used Yesod's floor after finishing this realization because Request is just that good. I really wasn't interested in doing the same fight multiple times to get enough pages. To be fair I was playing it at the end of early access and one of the very last changes they made was "double the number of pages that drop in every reception", so that may be less important in the release version. And of course in general his floor offers a lot of straightforward power.
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Jul 5, 2022 10:10
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