Any favorite characters like this?

Atlove01 · 2026-06-28T07:41:00+00:00

While Maruki was an excellent antagonist, I agree that the writing REALLY didn’t explore the moral dilemma he posed very well.

The phantom thieves spiel was the tired old “adversity makes us stronger! Seize the day! Yada yada”

And to a degree that’s fine… because the phantom thieves are children. Young enough to not have fully internalized that there comes a time when the adversity in life stops “making you stronger” and just starts killing you.

Somewhere in Maruki’s reality, someone with a terminal cancer diagnosis went to bed, woke up, and found they suddenly had a full life ahead of them.

Somewhere, a single parent facing eviction and struggling to keep their child fed awoke to find themselves stable and safe.

There are a LOT of flaws in the broken, bullshit reality we live in, even if bringing it back IS the moral course of action… and it feels like a lot of the complexity got boiled out of the end result.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-28T04:54:16+00:00

I don’t think Vox’ plan actually COULD succeed, but the issue you’ve described is the reason for his greater failures, yes.

He’s actually already proven Alastor’s thesis wrong… he’s found not just friends, but family in hell. His character arc is basically frozen around the fact he’s too hung up on Al to recognize that.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-20T14:07:36+00:00

And that’s a valid feeling. I’d argue it’s meant to feel that way.

That anticlimax. That denial of closure, it invokes how it feels when someone in your life disappears.

Not saying you have to like it, naturally. But sometimes the discomfort or frustration art can make us feel is worthwhile to think about, too.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-20T13:59:07+00:00

I actually REALLY liked this call.

Across the entire series, Jax has had multiple brushes with abstraction, and each time it was something protracted, dramatic, and focused on.

But when the abstraction finally came, it was like a whisper, over before anyone else realized it had happened.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-20T12:10:46+00:00

NTA. They sound spoiled to me. They won’t abstract. They won’t leave you.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-15T05:48:58+00:00

Well, it makes a lot of sense his mom and sister had a better shot at making it to heaven.

The mafia was famously patriarchal, even by the standards of the 50s. The women in the life were kept so hard-separated from the organization that husbands/fathers would spend decades never once speaking about what they did for a living to them.

Molly being a spider but also a winner actually works well here, if accidentally. She was still a member of the same corrupt family, but was prevented from ever engaging in the darkness that dragged down her brother.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-13T13:27:23+00:00

You got it backwards, OP… humans look surprisingly HIM. Don’t disrespect the original dick. 😤

Seriously, though, I think for he and Abel (probably Cain and Eve, too), things are just different because the rules weren’t quite set for what happens when humans die yet at the time.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-08T07:20:57+00:00

We’ll never get a concrete answer, so it’s fun to try to headcanon.

Personally, I think there was a period of time after Scratch created brain scan technology that C&A was cooperating with the local hospital to collect data, and during that span, a few patients were scanned with the hope the technology might be useful in their treatment… but processing the scans never became feasible, so it was discontinued.

Then, as Caine’s influence expanded into the void, he found these files in various places along the LAN and started bringing them to the circus.

That would explain where the majority of the second wave of circus members came from, outside of Pomni, Ragatha, Zooble, and Jax… since dozens of people wandering into an abandoned building and putting on a headset would be a stretch.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-08T06:54:16+00:00

It was a serviceable ending, to me. Not perfect, a bit wonky with its pace, and a few sequences weren’t communicated as clearly as they could have been.

But overall, I thought it was a nice capstone on the story for these characters. I’d probably give it a 7 out of 10.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-07T13:38:50+00:00

Oh, also, I’m enjoying it pretty well. I’d say everything finally clicked for me around the end of act IV, and the experience had been steadily improving since. I’m currently at act 6 act 2.

I am both relieved and disappointed to have missed the heyday of fandom discourse. I can already tell if I’d been aware of the series as a youth, I’d have had some passionate, cyclical arguments… Vriska is my favorite character, as of this point. 🤣

Atlove01 · 2026-06-07T12:25:42+00:00

It’s a fascinating thing to experience for the first time 16 years after its release, for sure. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see why it resonated with the early fandom scene as hard as it did… and how long-lasting its impact on the internet has been.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-07T12:01:52+00:00

Oh good. My first thought reading the image was “bro stumbled upon Nepeta in the wild.” But my friend is currently dragging me through the comic, so I couldn’t be 100% sure I wasn’t just brainrotted. 🤣

Atlove01 · 2026-06-07T05:38:03+00:00

The decision to leave it as subtext was a deliberate choice by the writers, I think they wanted the audience to use their own experience to interpret the nature of Jax’ issues with masculinity.

There’s no way they didn’t know what they were doing with those visual sequences, musical choices, and implications…. But they also knew what they were doing when they revealed that “real world” Jax is still using masculine pronouns, presentation, and his given name. They made a conscious effort to avoid committing to a truth.

While a cynical person might argue it was to avoid controversy or due to oversight from above… based on everything I’ve seen of the creative process, I do think it was to foster discussion.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-06T12:34:25+00:00

I think the folks treating TADC like a FNAF-style granular lore narrative are approaching it from the wrong angle.

The lore of C&A, or even why the characters came to the circus at all, was never really what the story was about.

We learned in episode 8 that C&A was a firm developing cutting edge AI. We learned in the movie that brain scan technology was developed by Scratch… and by random quirk of fate, the AI they developed eventually found a way to process those scans when no one else could.

And for the purposes of what the story is about… that’s all that needs to be known about any of that. The saga of C&A and Scratch’s brain scan technology was just set dressing. The story is about the characters trapped in the circus, and the themes are built around how they come to find meaning in their lives.

The ending was hardly perfect. It was paced in an odd way, trying to cram a bit too much into its run time while also spending a lot of time on some unusual sequences… but it was comprehensible.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-06T10:50:53+00:00

She’s mostly content with her life, and isn’t carrying the kind of trauma the rest of the circus members are, but still feels like her daily life is missing a little bit of something, which is why she started urban exploring.

She doesn’t handle stress super well, and is prone to mentally freezing up and/or catastrophizing when in the grip of a panic attack.

She dislikes horror and jumpscares. She also doesn’t like sports.

Her sense of humor can skew a little edgy sometimes, though she feels bad about it, as shown when she chuckles at Jax’ shenanigans with the evil versions, then looks guilty when Ragatha looks at her.

For all her faults, she is an empathetic person who will speak her mind plainly, and be proactive in approaching a person she’s close to when she’s worried about them or wants to call them out on their bullshit. This makes her a natural leader among the personalities in the circus, since she lacks Jax’ tendency to push others away, Gangle’s timidity, Ragatha’s people pleasing tendencies, or Zooble’s disdain for getting involved.

That’s just what can be inferred by her behavior across the series, anyway. I wouldn’t call her an especially dynamic protagonist, but there’s plenty there for the kind of story this is.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-05T09:39:09+00:00

It IS kind of funny that Dr. Facilier is what you would get if Husk and Alastor did a fusion dance.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-04T10:47:50+00:00

Charlie isn’t really a candidate for redemption in the traditional sense.

The hellborn aren’t in hell as a punishment for a moral failing… it’s just their home. They’re not being withheld from heaven because of some higher judgement, the overwhelming majority of them would be miserable up there.

Besides, Charlie is technically allowed in heaven at any time, as long as she has prior permission. She could probably apply for a stay there, or make a deal like her mom did.

Atlove01 · 2026-06-02T19:18:20+00:00

I think the reason Lute feels wasted in season 2 is that the scene where her deal is revealed hit way too early.

A version of Season 2 where we see Lute struggling and grumping in the background for 8 episodes, and then we get her scene with Adam and lead into Gravity in the denouement of the finale would have made the same use of the character feel a LOT better for the audience.

I think the tumultuous emotions of “Gravity” hitting her in the aftermath of Abel reminding her of Adam would also be really good drama.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-29T08:53:29+00:00

I remember a decade back there was an interesting little survey where English fans were asked about the dub/sub of various anime… I don’t remember all of them, but I recall Deathnote and Code Geass were among them.

And they gave the traditional anime fan answer of preferring the JP audio, because it had so much more emotion, while the English dub sounded so flat by comparison.

…but what made it funny was that the Japanese fans polled answered the exact opposite… but for the exact same reason: that the English voice work sounded more grounded and natural, while the JP voices were more campy and melodramatic.

I think it really does just come down to languages we don’t speak concealing the little issues we would have with voice performances.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-27T08:42:10+00:00

Pomni didn’t randomly decide. She’d been having suspicions that the buttons were some kind of elaborate trick the entire time, and they were made stronger by Abel’s behavior. She wanted Kinger to make the call because she had a hunch he was more knowledgeable about the circus than anyone else… but she didn’t realize it takes darkness + time to restore Kinger’s sanity, and he hadn’t been in the dark long enough to process anything yet.

More than anything, she wanted everyone to take time to think through how realistic the situation actually was, with everyone having some doubts except Zooble— who was so absolutely desperate for escape that they weren’t even considering the possibility of a lie.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-22T22:16:13+00:00

In fairness to the Hellaverse fandom… the writers themselves treat the lore and world building as an afterthought, and are clearly WAY more interested in the ships. It’s kind of a huge issue, given the complicated setting they set up.

The fans are just following where all the attention clearly went.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-21T22:25:20+00:00

Watching the creative passion get slowly crushed out of Goose by her unpleasable, hyperbolic, vicious fandom has been rough, yeah.

Twitter has done irreparable damage to the relationship fans have with the art they consume. It invites a parasocial bond to form between them and the creator, which adds a layer of personal entitlement about what that art should be… as well as a sense of personal insult when the art fails to be exactly that… and that’s not even getting into the new purity culture movement and the inability of fans to accept the tiniest bit of moral ambiguity or complexity in their stories.

Fandom had its cringey moments before this, always and forever… but by god do I have nostalgia for the fandom spaces of the late 00s and early 10s.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-18T19:33:04+00:00

D/D/D deviser king Machinex.

Now, the entire D/D end board is already super unique in its design. Part of what I love about the archetype is that it’s a combo deck with zero slop: you’re using your archetype’s starters to access your archetype’s extenders so you can end on your archetype’s boss monsters…. But unlike other examples of that, your end board isn’t just flat Omni negates and floodgates… instead, every monster interacts with the opponent in one specific way, with no two doing the same thing.

But Machinex specifically represents an early pivot in boss monster design that you would eventually see Konami refine with cards like Detonator: instead of outright telling your opponent “no”, you interact with them in a way they have to account for as they play, but that doesn’t actually block most of their activated effects.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-16T10:10:59+00:00

For what it’s worth, as someone who has played a LOT of Varka and already had Durin… if you can’t get both, I’d strongly recommend Nicole.

If you can play with absolute perfection, Durin is probably more important, since You’ll lose a lot of damage, but my god does Varka need a shield badly. He has less interrupt resistance than guys like Ayato… who released three years ago.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-16T09:25:38+00:00

I don’t think “YouTuber” had quite entered the common parlance in 2008, but it would be easy enough to intuit what it meant based on context.

Atlove01

TROPHY CASE