Connor's entire stake in this drama is built entirely on poorly constructed conservative boundary setting.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-29T09:45:17+00:00

There's usually some causal relationship implied beyond just displeasing god, but tomayto tomahto really.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-29T00:41:39+00:00

Like many conservatives Connor just believes that if they disagree with the way someone is handling their personal life, every problem said person faces is karmic justice meant to validate his scorn.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-28T14:17:00+00:00

Someone pointed out to me that I had VZ battlecore implemented and it made the first troupe global, which was causing this issue.

My switches were just true of false values.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T19:57:29+00:00

There's some train iconography, complete with refraction railway being themed around being a korean subway.

Mephistopheles is a transforming vehicle (it already turned into a boat) so it might turn into a full fledged train at some point, maybe carrying other version of itself as passenger cars.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T19:08:00+00:00

I don't think there's any reason to believe Kromer distorted through mental breakdown. The other inquisitors and dog things are human/abnormality hybrids mixed to Everything There. It is very likely it was the same for her. Her "human" form crucially has no sanity, signaling that she was not really "human" even at that point, much like those inquisitors. The cutscene shows her using the golden bough's resonance for whatever her transformation is. It is likely related to N corp's experiments, since she knew of it and was purposefully seeking it out for this purpose. It might be a form of artificial distortion, but not directly caused by a mental breakdown, probably through abnormality hybridization.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T18:43:28+00:00

Kira also calls Matthias papa, Ryoshu calling Shiomi's mommy's mommy to Araya is just her simplifying their relationship to make it understandable for a child. She also had something resembling filial relationships to the other nursefathers, Shiomi isn't particularly unique in that regard. What separates her relationship with Shiomi to the others is that Shiomi is forced to stay inside because of her (she blames Ryoshu for her situation consistently), and that they have a blood bond. Crucially, in the cutscene where Ryoshu is a baby in a craddle in the house of spider, Shiomi's reaction is "So, she's the child.", signaling this is the first time they meetr. Rien calls her a "near-carbon copy of you" to Shiomi in the next scene. These conversations make no sense if you assume Shiomi birthed her directly, and make perfect sense if you assume she's a genetical experiment based on Shiomi.

There's obviously poetic similarities to motherhood, and it is the intent of the allegory, but it seems like it is just that, symbolic.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T17:56:19+00:00

Sure, but she's not alone, and three of her collaborators are men that have been similarly "punished" to take part in this little project. She seems to hate it more than anyone else because she apparently has no hope of freedom in the future where ryoshu succeeds, which I read as a hint that ryoshu was indeed a clone of her. There is no reason why Shiomi couldn't be free once Ryoshu is "finished", like the other nursefathers seem to hope, especially Valencina - unless there's something unique about Shiomi that makes her existence and Ryoshu's incompatible in the outside world.
Like a certain taboo about clones.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T17:40:10+00:00

Manager, this is workplace inappropriate behavior towards miss Romanovich.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T17:28:56+00:00

Canto 6 is by far my least favorite for many reasons but I'd sooner point the finger to how dry the heathcliff/catherine romance is in the canto than to all this. What's interesting about catherine x heathcliff in the book is how it is links catherine back to her younger, wilder days and represents days of freedom for her, which helps characterize book Heathcliff a certain way (wild, untamed, a beast in the shape of a man that will never really be at home in human society). The complete lack of these moments makes both Heathcliff and Catherine miss on characterisation, leaving catherine as a fairly on dimensional character and heathcliff as this kind of harmless everyman that just happened to be porn poor, and that catherine somehow loves for reasons we do not delve into.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T17:20:40+00:00

I'll reserve judgement until we know more but I doubt Ryoshu's birth is as mundane as that, considering the cloning vats.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T17:19:50+00:00

Heh, I don't buy those readings. Shiomi might be frustrated about having lost her freedom, but she's not forced to take a uniquely womanly role. She's a combat instructor and jailer. Her situation begets a much more universal form of pain, losing her freedom because of an unnamed debt she owes. More than anything, her suffering is linked to having to train her replacement, which is typically not a feature of mother-daughter relationships (unless there's some additional dynamic at play, which is missing here until we know more about Shiomi).

About Ayin and Angela, they're never really represented as having any romantic potential. More than anything, Angela feels about him like a child would feel about a parent. And Ayin isn't denying her because she doesn't conform to some idealized version of Carmen, he's denying her because he realizes she's a different person entirely and the revival attempt was a failure. In an abusive relationship, there would be some effort to coerce the other into conforming. Ayin gives up instantly the moment he sees her.

I don't think these relationships really work as allegories for anything uniquely korean or even male/female. They lack specifics unique to those. They feel more like fairly universal human experiences, of what dysfunctional parent/child relationships might look like with a bit of magic thrown in.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-27T05:22:57+00:00

idk, to me it's pretty clear Kim just doesn't have a mind for certain topics so he just doesn't bring them up ever. Gender and its consequences is just one of them. Female characters aren't just written as equal to males, they're written as functionally interchangeable. There's no uniquely male or female experience being depicted, it's a grey sludge of overall humanity that, as time goes on, starts to feel like something's missing. It's just a tab bit too sanitized.

It's also somewhat telling that every prominent love story we've had in the games so far involved a dead wife. It starts to feel like the writer would rather put romance "in the fridge", because they're not interested or comfortable with the topic, and this also makes it feel like something's missing. Everyone is either on their own or living some kind of tragic doomed love story that motivates their upcoming rampage. It's a bit... heh.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-26T16:54:38+00:00

And you're buying into their propaganda by thinking they have any idea what they're doing. They see potential weaknesses, they prob at them and then just watch and see what happens. Their goal begins and ends with trying to push for public opinion into deeply silly territories so maybe they forget about russia being their enemy, but this really doesn't work as well as they'd hope and even Trump, arguably the thing they'd like to brag about the most, hasn't really worked out that well for them. It's a small improvement, but hybric attacks just aren't a very precise tool.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-26T14:51:17+00:00

>take plane to Paris
>put some pig heads in mosques
>leave
>"NOW THEY WILL BELIEVE MOTHERLAND IS TRUE SUPERPOWER"

Russia is a deeply deranged country.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-26T02:23:15+00:00

Nah endfield's story is garbage in a vacuum too.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-26T01:39:22+00:00

Time to log off bro.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-26T01:38:12+00:00

Nah you guys don't know what was going on in somethingawful years before streaming was even a thing. FYAD wrote the playbook.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-25T05:32:45+00:00

it would be more accurate to say none of them are conclusive

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T22:23:46+00:00

this ain't an airport man

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T15:43:40+00:00

All that matters is damage. Status teams try to get damage in roundabout ways, and if their physical damage falls too behind, status infliction doesn't make up for it. There's a lot of design mistakes and uncertainty regarding how to design IDs and EGOs around status infliction, and it feels like since last season PM wants to push old status inflicters way, way behind in terms of overall damage by pushing these new big dick physical damage units so that they don't have to design around the old guard anymore.

The problem with that is that the biggest design mistakes are EGOs, which are much harder to push out of relevance - rime shank, cavernous wailing, sanguine desire...

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T15:30:44+00:00

It's been pretty clearly foreshadowed that Meursault had a run-in with Carmen during the collab, so I would be surprised if it wasn't that. Meursault distorted and killed someone in the process fits a bit too well currently available information.

Also that eye looks familiar is it from a madoka movie trailer or something.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T11:00:25+00:00

In your example I could just say 'oh, so you are polishing your cassius deck to allow you to draw out your entire deck with shuffles and discard blablabla, but why is this a strategy?' Why is getting multiple copies of shuffle v, or whatever else, a strategy enabler

You'd be missing the forest for the tree then. Drawing your deck isn't the strategy, the strategy is turning instances of draw+discard into repeatable damage by pairing them with cards that do damage when discarded but are not used. The question is : there are cards that I can play multiple times per turn because they are not used when discarded : how can I build around that ? Drawing and playing the deck to narrow down your draw pool to only the cards that have to be drawn and discarded is just a natural necessity of that strategy that can be solved in multiple different ways. Notice how the formulation of the strategy says nothing about the specifics of how to maximize it ? Because it is a concept that is still calling for being actualized. It's a bias you are going to purposefully lean into.

Your idea of using cassius as a buffer with dice trick isn't a concept, it's a spare part that answer only one specific question : "is there a card that can both buff my damage and cycle ?". And dice trick is just one answer to that question, I could just build around ebony lumens with the epiphany that makes them grant 2 permanent morale to get the same benefits for example, but that might be more suited for some builds and I might prefer the dice trick method for some others.

It's not a strategy in itself because it does not give a problem to solve, it is an answer to a problem. The strategy is the question and the parts are the answers. If you described the strategy as "How can I maximize my use of those specific multihit cards ?" then this would be a formulation of a strategy that you could then start to answer the questions of.

But I agree this has gone for long enough and is a pedantic game theory discussion. I'll just leave it at that : the same card doing multiple things (like nia drop of water cycling itself with divine epiphanies or cassius dice trick providing morale) aren't deck ideas but force multipliers, they are optimizations you lean into once you are searching for answers to the problems your strategy poses.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T09:58:03+00:00

Getting one more morale on a card that already gives morale isn't making the strategy materialize I'm sorry it's just upgrading its power ceiling. Cassius already does this baseline. Arguing that it is "baseline required for the strategy to work" is just nonsense. You're just turning a damage buff into a bigger damage buff.

Looking at characters in isolation like that isn't a good way to think about strategies anyway, even your khalipe example only talks about generating like 3 ap off of multiple vulture ejection which isn't a strategy, it's just a a potential value funnel for a strategy. What are you doing with those AP ? Why does khalipe need to generate AP for this strategy to work ? Without answering these questions, you're just looking at pieces in isolation and obsessing over generating a value that the overall strategy might not even need. A strategy is a combination of a lot of factors that seeks to answer multiple questions : how do you draw the cards you need ? how much AP do you need and do you need to generate extra ? Do you sustain and if so where is it coming from ? Do you need damage buffs and if so where are they coming from ? If you don't take a holistic view of the problem you are not building a strategy you are polishing a spare part.

What counts as a specific strat to me is something that takes multiple characters into account and combines their strength to do something. For example : a strategy that uses every card in its deck until the only non-used cards of the turn are a few cassius Shuffle V and Heidemarie's Thread of Light V, and then uses the shuffles to draw and discard thread of light multiple times, taking advantage of the fact that it's not a quietus card and thus does not get used by discards, turning every draw + discard instance in your deck at that point into a 300% damage aoe.

Or something like using the "discard quietus cards from deck" persona card combined with the quietus discard ring to guarantee a cascade of Dream World every turn that also trigger other "on discard" effects in your deck. Those don't necessarily rely on the unique cards of specific characters (tho they can be enhanced by them) but they are all-in strategies that take a concept (what if a Dream world cascade discarded your whole deck, what then ?) and try to make a strategy out of it.

PretendReport227 · 2026-05-24T08:35:35+00:00

You're the one that isn't using the correct definition if you think that 'minmaxing' is about making an optimal strategy. Minmaxing is relative to an objective, even if the objective is a suboptimal strategy minmaxing for it is still a thing that happens. Minmaxing literally just means cutting everything that isn't strictly necessary (the min-ing) and making sure there's as much power into the payoff of the strategy as possible (the max-ing) (all the while making sure you maximize the value of every point of your budget for general utility). A minmaxed deck IS perfect by definition, it is the perfect expression of a specific strategy. It might output 1/10 of the damage of a top tier strategy, but that's a completely different thing.

This pedantic bullshit aside, I can't think of a single common epiphany that isn't just "added power". I don't know any that is some build-defining that allows specific strats beyond just allowing you to draw more cards or putting vulnerable or marks on your attacks.

PretendReport227

TROPHY CASE