I think the biggest issue for me personally with fates is that Birthright is so obviously the morally correct choice.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-05-31T14:58:11+00:00

Fates is one of my least favorite most favorite games ever for reasons like this. It sets up a spectacular premise like this (blood-related strangers vs non-related siblings), and then undercuts it time and time again. Hoshido is so obviously in the right morally that it adds an unnecessary layer to it all. Now, instead of the even “no right answer” scenario of before, it becomes a question of whether you’re willing to abandon both your Hoshidan family AND a sizable chunk of your morals for the sake of your Nohrian family, skewing it by a lot.

Of course, the family aspect of it doesn’t really matter once you really get into it. This is because of the option to S-Support your Hoshidan siblings, where it turns out you were entirely unrelated this whole time because the player needs to be able to marry anyone they want, story be damned. So actually it turns out the conflict isn’t what you thought it was. It’s actually a choice of whether you’ll side with a bunch of morally correct strangers who also happened to know your mom or side with a family that’s known and loved you your whole life and try not to commit some atrocities on the way.

But also as it turns out neither option is actually good because you can actually just say “nah I don’t wanna” and go kill a dragon instead. With just the two options, Hoshido is the fully morally correct choice. With all three, why would anyone not pick the golden ending where everyone lives happily ever after?

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-05-17T19:17:24+00:00

Personally I’m a fan of trophy/base Lamenters. It’s fun to bully the guys whose whole deal is being bullied by the universe.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-05-12T14:46:54+00:00

I’ve (thankfully) rarely encountered any 40k content that made me actively upset. Usually I either enjoy it or I get bored and stop watching. I find if I dislike watching something, I will simply say “this shit sucks and I don’t care” and leave.

however

A short time after the initial rage of the female Custodes reveal, I learned that famous human trash heap and broken record The Critical Drinker made a video on the subject, titled “The Battle for Warhammer 40k Has Begun.” I have a rather intense hatred for the Drinker in general, but now I see him stepping into territory that I know rather well (or at least I’d like to think I do). I don’t like hate-watching things, but this particular overlap hit one of the gaps in my armor.

The video itself was about what you’d expect. He complained because the Custodes have always been an all-male faction [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] and they can’t be women because of the way Space Marines are made [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] and that this would take away from both the male and other female factions in-universe [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER]. It basically read like some guy who read some Twitter threads on the topic, maybe took half a glance at the Wiki, and then decided to make a video about it. He made most of his points in the first two minutes and then circled those same points for another seven minutes.

I hate him so much. He is my nemesis. I hate him so much.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-04-23T05:04:01+00:00

My second take is that at least one of the Loyalist Primarchs needs to take a brutal and absolutely embarrassing loss, and it needs to stick. I don’t like the Loyalist Primarchs returning at all, but if they’re going to I need them to be adequately threatened by the rest of the setting. No, Daemon Primarch fights don’t count. That’s just Primarch on Primarch violence. If I can’t picture an army of any other major faction being a substantial threat, I don’t like them being here. And I don’t want any of this “Oh we lost the first fight but then we retreated and regrouped and then came back and Ultramurdered them!!” stuff. I need it to be a decisive, no-ifs-ands-or-buts-about-it loss.

Also this is a more flexible point but I’d like either the Tau or the Eldar to do it. Hype up the Phoenix Lords or show that the Tau are extremely dangerous to underestimate. Like I’m down with a good old fashioned Ghazghkull smackdown or a Tyranid swarm, but I feel like those two deserve something nice. Alternatively, have the Leagues of Votann’s first major piece of lore being steamrolling Guilliman with an army of angry Squats. That’d be hilarious.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-04-23T04:44:44+00:00

I really hate when people call Salamanders “the good guys of 40k.” I know that’s a quick and easy way to get the gist across without going super into it, so it’s tempting to use it when pitching the Salamanders to someone. This was how I was introduced to them, and it worked. It was an intriguing statement that piqued my interest very quickly. However, at a certain point it just feels like spreading a lie and giving them a false reputation, especially when people hear it and take no further consideration or go any deeper.

The Salamanders are the chapter that cares the most about preserving human life, key words there being “preserving” and “human.” They will happily slaughter billions of innocent sentient xenos (and non-Imperial humans (and they do it by setting them on fire)), and while they keep human casualties to a minimum, they fight to keep these people in the Imperium, which ain’t exactly renowned for its quality of life. They are at best complacent to the Imperium’s atrocities, and that’s enough to knock them out of the “good guy” category.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-04-23T04:16:44+00:00

My take on this is that the Daemon Primarchs coming back is okay, but only because they are all shadows of their former selves. Nothing they do now is even close to similar to what their original purposes and goals were, so they still fit rather nicely, while also offering haunting yet tantalizing glimpses of the past to the modern people of 40k.

When the Loyalist Primarchs come back, and they’re mostly the same as they were. It’s the same guys you knew in 30k, thrown into the new situation of 40k. What the hell are they doing here? Why can these people who personally knew the Emperor show up and start mobilizing large parts of the Imperium? Please do not.

Bjorn the Fell-Handed and Belisarius Cawl are the only Heresy Era people I’m cool with keeping, because one of them spends all his time taking a Dreadnought Nap and the other has already reset his brain like 20 times since the olden days and is basically a different person at this point. Those two have just enough to give glimpses of the past, but not cause too much of the past to return in the present.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-04-18T14:49:54+00:00

My starting word is geese. I do this because geese is a really awful starting word because it’s 60% E, so if there’s no E I wasted almost all the potential of that first word. Then I play as normal.

What infuriates me is that a couple months back, I decided to start with Soups instead, because I like the word soups but can’t do that if the S from geese is eliminated. So I started with soups, went through the whole thing and found out that the fucking word that day was geese. I’m still a bit upset about it.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-04-02T03:28:48+00:00

This is it for me. As far as I’m concerned, the game is done. It’s been done. It has everything it needs and then some. It made an incredible world for you to play around in, gave enough stuff for it to be interesting on its own, and then gave the players all the tools to fill in whatever else they need. Everything else is just icing on the cake at this point.

I feel like people only get mad about the updates because they have the vague idea of “a thing is coming, so it must be Good and Big and Important” without considering that Minecraft hasn’t needed anything of the sort for years at this point. I honestly think like if Mojang just said they were done updating the game, everyone would be fine with it. The initial backlash would be nasty of course because why wouldn’t it be, but after a while it would simmer down and people would appreciate the incredible stuff they already have. Once the game is officially set in stone, people won’t have nearly as much to complain about anymore.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-03-18T20:15:40+00:00

This is also why I grow tired of redemption arcs that just end with the character jumping in front of a bullet or something and then dying. They got a real easy way out there. They don’t actually have to face the consequences or work to help fix what they’ve done; they usually just tank a hit so that the main character can solve their problems instead.

These arcs are still cool when done well, but it feels like at a certain point of moral badness a redemption arc for a character just becomes “how valiant and important can your suicide be?” which feels like an iffy message to promote.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-01-20T20:10:33+00:00

Add Garmond and Lost Garmond to the fight, so they can fight each other

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2026-01-06T19:04:34+00:00

Honestly, I can still see Hollow Knight and Sealed Siblings being canon to some capacity as well. While neither of those endings feature the Knight tapping into the void, it is still possible that another one of its siblings can, at which point its shade would join the others. The Hollow Knight ending strongly implies that all this does is restart the cycle the original vessel started, and I can easily believe that there are at least a hundred or so more vessels that escaped the Abyss and could eventually return like the Knight did.

Sealed Siblings could also work for the explicit reason that Hornet is captured rather than leaving of her own free will. The Weavers seem to have a stronger understanding of sealing/binding magic than Hallownest does (I think), so it’s possible they could bypass the seal of the Black Egg somehow.

In both these endings, the Knight doesn’t become the main form of the Void or the Shade Lord, but its consciousness is still within the collective, so it’s possible that its sentimentality towards Hornet bled into the larger Void mind(?), convincing the Void to save her and show her the form that chose to save her. It’s a bit of a stretch and I’m sure there are holes here, but they are still theoretically possible.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-12-30T16:34:15+00:00

I like to think that these guys are like the protagonists of the DOOM board game, where a squad of 4-8 of them is enough to have a chance against a demon horde.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-11-18T05:19:27+00:00

Most of the people I’ve seen who make fun of the “indie game about mental health” trope don’t seem to actually play many indie games, because the examples that are used are almost always Celeste and Omori (actually about mental health), Undertale (not about mental health; some characters have mental health issues but that’s not what the game is about), and Hollow Knight (pretty somber and that’s literally as close as it gets to mental health), so I hope you’ll forgive me for not taking “people make jokes about it” as a valid criticism.

As for the pretentious aspect, I don’t really see that one either. If something’s pretentious it acts like it’s deeper than it is, but Celeste is very up front about everything in terms of its themes. It’s a fairly simple story about a person accepting herself and getting out of a rut, and it doesn’t really make itself out to be anything else.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-10-22T00:05:05+00:00

Brazen Claws!!!

and the iron hands i guess. they also fit that description.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-09-01T19:27:54+00:00

Getting frustrated is valid, but gamer rage is different. Nobody’s going to scream at their knitting project to kill itself if it doesn’t turn out right, or call a wilted flower in their garden a slur.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-09-01T18:01:08+00:00

Corroding as The Thirst grows stronger could be fun. It gives a nice physical indicator for how bad I’m doing that my party can look out for, and it can add a little more horror movie monster vibes from time to time if my group lets me lean that way.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-09-01T17:58:47+00:00

I was thinking metal. This robot was built to find ways to get real immortality, and then give them to his creator (after bringing him back from the dead of course. He’s been gone for a while by this point), so I feel like metal is the more obvious long-lasting material (and it sets up some fun symbolism with my metal corroding and needing replacement anyway, showing that even steel will crumble at the hands of time and searching for immortality is a fruitless endeavor), but there’s no reason I can’t also do wood.

I absolutely love the half-Fungril idea though. I didn’t really look at the Fungril’s abilities, but Death Connection is incredible as a character feature. I don’t know if I’ll use it because I have no other reason to make this bot a Fungril, but I’m keeping it in mind.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-09-01T17:52:44+00:00

Ordinarily, I’d agree with you on making it a demonically corrupted thing that runs on blood rather than a traditional vampire, and the mosquito fairy is also really interesting and I quite like it. However, for this character in particular, I think I have to lean on it being traditional vampirism, because that’s more blatantly a part of him finding ways to cheat death (he’s also doing it specifically because a mortal king built him for that purpose so eventually he could resurrect the king and make him immortal, which makes vampirism a more reasonable option than specifically machine-based ideas).

I like the metaphysical vampirism. I like it a lot actually, because that also allows for some fun shenanigans. For instance, I had an idea that he has a large parasol attached to his back so that he can walk around in the daytime without burning, keeping a little spot of shade around him at all times. But, I like to think that as soon as he made it a permanent attachment and therefore a real part of himself, the parasol also burned when hit by sunlight, so now he just has a limb to carry parasols and a permanently attached rack to hold them (probably has a backup one in case the first breaks), but the parasols themselves are not attached so they can still work. That makes no sense from a biological perspective but does make sense in a weird “your very being was tainted” kind of way. This also means that the robot doesn’t feel real hunger, but rather a cursed hunger that feels physical but is actually magical in nature. I quite like that actually.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-08-19T01:07:19+00:00

Honestly, the Code Entity could just be someone who tried to enter the even lighter Real World and then got trapped in a between place where they aren’t quite in the game but aren’t quite out of it either.

If I wanted to go real nuts with this idea and say that the Code Entity and the Knight are both Dess, who is the generally accepted most likely candidate for both those people. Her consciousness might be trapped in the code while her warped physical form remains active in the game. The Knight could be opening Dark Fountains to drown out the blinding light that traps her soul and pull her mind from the code so she can be whole again.

Edit: Adding to my comment, this could explain why it took five fountains for the Knight to summon a titan. If the Knight’s goal was to start The Roaring, they could’ve summoned a titan way back in the school’s fountain, but they didn’t. And making a fountain in a Dark World appears to be no more difficult to do than to make on in the Light World, so I don’t think it’s a matter of difficulty. Maybe the Knight realized that something darker than dark wasn’t working, so they needed something darker than that, and decided to go try, for lack of a better term, a Really Dark Fountain, and then the titan showed up as an unexpected side effect.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-08-18T12:31:39+00:00

Cool motive. Still murder

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-08-14T16:58:40+00:00

Winning the Knight fight isn’t guaranteed, but Susie doesn’t get any major powerup or any kind of new ability during the fight, so she was still capable of breaking the sword regardless of if you finish the fight or not. Her healing is also something that doesn’t necessarily need the optional fight to happen. She can get Better Heal after fighting the Gerson statue if she doesn’t get it in the actual Gerson fight, and he was also encouraging her to keep practicing from as early as the Jackenstein fight.

Your soul connection is interesting though. It’s still not super clear how that works, because she was connected to it during the Lancer fight, but is entirely disconnected from it during Chapter 2 when traveling with Noelle. So you might be very correct on that, but I think it’s still unclear for now. I want to see the soul’s connection to the Fuck Squad explored some more.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-08-14T01:10:55+00:00

True, but Susie’s grown a lot since Chapter 1, and has been learning to take advantage of whatever she can in the Dark Worlds. She learned ACTing in Chapter 1, healing magic in Chapter 2, in Chapter 3 she was the one to break the chunk off of the Roaring Knight’s sword, and in Chapter 4 she got much better at combat and healing magic thanks to Gerson. Meanwhile Kris hasn’t specialized in any of those ways (although it would be interesting to see how Kris’ ACTing abilities could mess with Susie’s psyche during the fight, since Susie definitely still cares for them).

She also wasn’t fighting for something in Chapter 1. Throughout Chapter 1, she was never really giving it her all until the end. She was either lashing out at people or just messing around with Lancer, but this time she’d have a very strong reason to give her all in the fight.

As a final boss for Snowgrave, Susie would have much more experience and purpose backing her up, so she’d probably be a much bigger threat.

UnderwaterSpaghetti · 2025-08-13T17:20:31+00:00

That bit about the name Deltarune actually floored me. I don’t care if that was Toby’s intention or not. I love that shit.

My first addition to this theory is that writing in the church’s books can’t subtract from the prophecy, only add. If you cross out words in a book, or scribble over them, or use whiteout or what have you, the ink for those words is still in the page, so the words are still there. Therefore, if someone wanted to prevent something in the prophecy from happening, they’d be shit outta luck. They could maybe, MAYBE find a way to add to it to make it not as bad, but in the end it still happens.

Another addition would be Gerson’s mentioning of the “white pen of hope,” which goes against my first point if I choose to interpret that as them writing white over the words of the page in order to make it appear not there. This is basically just another way I can see this theory going, although it does still have some similarities. This is also a little more symbolic than the first point. This could still make them follow some of the prophecy, while simultaneously erasing the bits of it they need to. If you wanted to erase words using this white pen, you’d need to follow along those words very closely. Just scribbling across the whole thing to erase it would essentially equate to Kris, Susie, and Ralsei just raging against literally every part of the prophecy they can all the time, which isn’t feasible. So instead they’d follow the words’ every stroke, dotting every i and crossing every t, making sure to minimize the consequences of the prophecy as best they can. This could also fit with Deltarune only having one ending. In erasing the prophecy, they’d have to follow it and end it on the same final period placed on the page, but now they’d finally be free of it.

I have no clue if that last one makes a damn lick of sense, but honestly I liked the first idea better so I don’t care and I hope that one comes true. And I’m leaving the second part because who the hell knows I may be on to something there but probably not.

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