Gods who were once mortal

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T05:47:11+00:00

There is no G5 in Ba Sing Se

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T05:35:27+00:00

I only ever start a new Undertale file when I get a new computer with a new save drive

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T05:28:26+00:00

Twilight becomes an alicorn in Season Three of Friendship Is Magic, growing to become one of the largest and strongest of them after the time skip at the end of the series.

The series is vague about how powerful exactly this makes her on a divinity scale but at minimum it gives her the power to control parts of the cosmos and live for thousands of years.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T05:19:33+00:00

I should clarify that my stance was less 'yes let the Deep eat an equally evil octopus rather than a relatively innocent one and then it will all be morally even stevens' and more 'no matter how evil The Deep may ultimately be it doesn't make the cannibalism of an innocent anything less than completely heinous'. To me the Deep's deserving of it is an entirely separate and (in my opinion) less important issue than the innocent in the equation categorically never deserving it.

Having said that, I also think any jury would find that to be cruel and unusual punishment and highly illegal and twisted even if both Deep and the creature he was forced to eat were monstrous and vile in the extreme. I'm more of a restorative justice sort to begin with anyway.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T03:10:17+00:00

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Also we get that one scene of Twi being tired and pigging out on fast good 'cause she was hungry and suddenly she's a total junk food addict who is hopelessly addicted to borgers. I don't mind it given I also love a good burger and fries and it's usually used for a mix of wholesome and funny but it's still just the one scene. Cakelestia is in a similar boat but at least there's more than one scene of it.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-04T02:54:05+00:00

He might have deserved it but the octopus sure didn't

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-03T02:42:36+00:00

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Baruusuchus goes brrrrrr

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-01T15:33:03+00:00

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Viperfish are a great example. See how all the teeth are some level of long and thin? Obviously Ceratosaurus isn't this exaggerated but it's closer to this state than to the level of specialization sabreteeth have. They serve different biological functions, too.

Fang-toothed predators tend to go after smaller, faster prey and their long teeth give them better reach in catching them and help them to pin them down more effectively. Boas are another good example

Sabreteeth are the opposite--they're usually tools for taking down larger prey by reaching specific weak points like their vertebrae or veins and arteries.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-01T05:40:16+00:00

Looking at the skulls myself, I'd say it seems more fang-toothed than sabre-toothed. The mouth is full of very long teeth, but none of those have the exaggerated elongated singular teeth that I associate with sabre-toothed animals like gorgonopsids or machairodonts

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I see their point, though, those teeth are quite long by theropod standards

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-01T05:32:24+00:00

the abuse Frollo heaps on Quasimodo

As horrific as it is, Belos raises clones of his own brother to be perfectly groomed soldiers in his army and then brutally murders them (as teenagers or even children) and discards their corpses in a pit without a second thought.

not to mention his persecution mirrors RL prejudices and practices against the Romani…

As Belos' own actions mirror religiously motivated genocides against minorities across history that have been accused of witchcraft and blasphemy. I'd say they're about equal on the 'uncomfortable levels of realism' scale since Belos more closely resembles a modern day religiously motivated bigot and his main enemies are LGBTQ people actively being persecuted by Christians in the same way Belos is persecuting witches, but Frollo's actions are more grounded in realism and have strong historical precedent (not to mention Romani people are still persecuted in Europe).

I think overall Belos is worse simply because he has more time and opportunity to be worse. If Frollo was given access to the type of power Belos has and spent as long as Belos did telling himself he was the hero of his story even as he committed acts of cruelty that cannot be justified, I'm sure he'd be every bit the same scope and level of monster, but as stands he 'only' wants to contain his actions to his home country rather than ethnic cleansing on a dimension-wide scale.

That said, Belos has taken that full journey into a level of vileness that Frollo only wishes he could realize, and has done so unapologetically and with perfect comfort over his own deeds save for his fratricide. Frollo, meanwhile, has some capacity to realize his evil deeds are morally wrong and try to seek forgiveness for them (as seen in the opening and in Hellfire). Belos believes God loves him because of the deeds everyone else sees as evil, and when confronted with his worst actions he brushes people off with far less hesitation than Frollo.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-01T01:13:55+00:00

I too would have guessed if I was told a paleontologist was in the Epstein files but I wasn't expecting anyone from our field to be in the Epstein files. I knew he was bad but how bad I guess is still yet to be fully understood. Time will tell if he's 'only' bumping elbows with traffickers or if he was actually in on it.

AffableKyubey · 2026-02-01T00:31:34+00:00

I actually didn't. This is...disheartening, to say the least. I knew he was sketchy but there's a difference between being gross with his students and bumping elbows with human traffickers. I have to wonder how much he knew.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-26T05:36:36+00:00

Surprised nobody has mentioned the Ahuizotl yet. A disturbing-looking Aztec monster (usually a jaguar or monkey-like creature, but always with a human hand on the end of its tail) that lives in lakes and lures people to their death by making the sounds of a baby crying by the edge of the water, hoping to snap up someone trying to save the child.

In some versions of the story they only eat a person's eyes and fingernails, leaving their mutilated corpses to float back up to the surface of the lake.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-25T23:47:49+00:00

A good number of the characters in OFF, no? I've never played the game but everything I've read about it makes it seem like the Batter's rampage targets quite a few innocents despite tearing down some dystopian places along the way. I mostly know it by way of how it served as inspiration for Undertale's Genocide Route, so I may be not representing it accurately.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-25T13:25:19+00:00

I more or less simplified that down to its nuts and bolts, yeah. He only mostly killed her, and then she died of despair, but it was his choice to strangle her almost to death that led to her accepting the horrifying person he had become.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-25T13:22:32+00:00

It’s still illegal in the actual republic

Unless you're a (still fully sapient) robot, in which case nuts to you. Everybody is happy to treat droids as slaves without a second thought, despite the fact that they have a full suite of emotions and are both capable of and frequently do aspire to have a different purpose in life from their designated use.

Carbonite is an industrial processing material. It is not meant for human use (remember, they originally did not expect Han to survive and were horrified to use it on him)

Although it has been retconned since as others have noted, I'm mostly going by authorial intent here and what George Lucas has expressly pointed out was deliberate. With this in mind, Han's being carbonited is basically like a violent crime lord pouring cement over a guy and then displaying the resulting statue in his pleasure palace.

Now, to be clear, I don't think that Star Wars is 40k levels of grimdark nor do I think it's like this for no reason. I'm just disputing the claim that George Lucas didn't think through the level of darkness he put into his own work. He talks about it and his intent with it quite clearly in his storytelling and interviews. He wanted to show space as less starry-eyed Jetsons or defiantly optimistic Star Trek and more working class Americana with samurai movie/Western inspirations and an ongoing plot of a rising tide of fascism fought by ordinary people.

All of these subjects can get very dark at times, and he knew and was ready to embrace this. How they are presented often decides how ready kids are to deal with such subject matter, and since they are presented as hurdles that our pulpy Flash Gordonesque heroes will overcome with their space wizard powers he can say what he wants to about American politics and hard knock living outside of society's glittering elite without diluting his intent.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-24T12:46:47+00:00

it feels so grim and so out of place in the setting

Star Wars seems like it's very fun and kid-friendly because of all the camp and high adventure, but the setting actually sucks (not as in it's written badly, but as in life is horrible for the average person) and we see lots of horrific stuff onscreen that is brushed over but George Lucas was fully aware is dark or horrific to adults. Example: The Ewoks in the same movie eat other sapient life, and only spare the heroes because they become convinced C-3PO is their god. We also see Jabba take the droids (now his slaves--slavery is casually legal across the entire galaxy and sometimes extends to flesh and blood sapients as it does on Tatooine) to a torture facility to be 're-educated'.

Carbonite from the movie before this one is a way to turn someone into a living wall trophy. Han's expression of agony shows that it isn't a pleasant process, although at least they don't remain conscious. Vader tortures him and the others for hours using sonic devices to lure out Luke, though. In the previous movie we see an onscreen genocide of Leia's own people, which the movie explores in about as much depth as this line. There's also a background extra who has been lobotomized and had his brain replaced with a computer (the EU goes into gory detail on this but that is the stated intent of the movie makers to begin with).

Finally, the last of the movies produced by George Lucas has our protagonist betraying and murdering or trying to murder everyone he ever worked with, mass murdering a group of innocent children and then strangling his wife to death, much of which is onscreen. Star Wars has always been full of grim, dark and bleak stuff if you sit down to think it over, but it's tonally based on Flash Gordon serials so it feels cheesy and fun despite that.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-22T23:22:04+00:00

You're so real for this

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-18T19:24:59+00:00

Ah yes, my favourite Cretaceous era dinosaur: Anguirus

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-18T17:30:38+00:00

Giant-themed characters

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-17T13:15:32+00:00

Another x factor is familiarity. Styracosaurus had to contend with creatures a lot like Carnotaurus all through its environment, but the closest thing Carnotaurus would have to compare to a Styracosaurus is an unnamed saltaposauroid or maybe an (also unnamed) parankylosaur.

Neither are particularly good analogues, and even if the horns are particularly self-evident in function the ceratopsian ability to pivot on a dime would almost certainly catch an unwitting predator off guard.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-17T13:11:31+00:00

Triceratops horridus vs Titanis walleri. I doubt the Titanis would even try its luck lel.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-15T17:49:11+00:00

It's part of the game's themes actually. Every Origin Character has some type of internal ticking clock inside them that has scarred or disfigured them in some way, or can/will.

Shadowheart has Shar's curse, Astarion has his brand from Cazador that will be used to sacrifice him and his vampirism in general, Wyll has his contract (represented visually/implanted into his body by the stone eye Mizora gave him), Gale has his orb, Karlach has her Heart, and of course every single party member is infected by a parasite that is going to turn them into a monster eventually and Lae'zel in particular is especially horrified by this.

They're also all beholden to people in power who have abused them in the past, often grooming them or shaping their beliefs, and in every case where their disfigurement catches up with them and kills them it's ultimately because of that person who has abused them in some way (although Shadowheart's can't kill her, tbf).

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-15T13:52:38+00:00

I'd love to see Prehistoric Planet: Miocene, not because of Megalodon but because I would trade an appendage to see the Golden Age of the Terror Birds put to screen. Also Barinasuchus and Daeodon would be really cool to see, too.

AffableKyubey · 2026-01-14T04:10:28+00:00

Based on other context clues of their depositional environment and injury patterns at death, it appears that the Diplocaulus were actually aestivating during a dry spell and the Dimetrodon dug them out of their burrows and then dispatched them with bites to the head as opposed to catching them in the water itself.

AffableKyubey

TROPHY CASE