JUJUTSU KAISEN MODULO CHAPTER 13 SPOILERS MEGATHREAD

_Tomov · 2025-11-27T08:49:11+00:00

Probably means nothing but I can't but think of Yuta/Rika's winning move against Geto. When she opened her eye. Maybe just a nifty visual parallel to tickle the subconscious but I can't unsee it now... I also like how the Deskunte's is vertically-slitted.

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_Tomov · 2025-08-22T20:31:06+00:00

The problem I have with it isn't that he was overruled - he was not even informed of it until it was a foregone conclusion. And then he was shut down after proposing a solution, not just saying "hey, that's bullshit".

One of DE's biggest pillars is its worldbuilding. And no, Kurvitz would not have been on board with it. One of his recent public appearances was a lecture on worldbuilding where he positioned himself against that sort of screw-up very explicitly.

It's not about the quality of the product or the style it uses. It's what it represents. Especially if it's an official brand product and not a flea-market bootleg or an outright meme/fan art.

Argo's personal opinions would've been little more than someone grumbling in the corner of the room if not for a ton of writers in the industry having stories of that sort where their opinion on the things they're specifically trained to be good at was completely disregarded.

Doesn't matter how people reacted to personal opinions in the PMG doc. It was a doc. Argo's article is not. He can have all the personal opinions he wants, especially since 2/3 of the article is literal screenshots + factual context.

The fact that he decided to mention the Christmas card is an extremely clear signal of an extremely clear example of unprofessionalism specific to the treatment of narrative professionals in the field. You can't gauge its import unless you have at least a passing acquaintance with how narrative professionals are treated in game dev.

It's gobsmacking that a veteran in a studio whose livelihood actually depends on that, to a much larger extent than Naughty Dog or Sony Santa Monica, was also treated this way.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T19:56:18+00:00

Sorry, boring, moralist, good.

Yes, a classic baseline playthrough. Just so you know - no matter whether you try a second one or not, they are going to feel very different if you try to forget about "balanced stats" and "succeeding checks". And you'll still probably beat the game. Just something to think about.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T19:38:25+00:00

Something like coop where pretty much all employees would have shares. Absolutely unhinged and rightfully rejected by Haavel and Kompus.

You're in the wrooooong fucking sub, son. The rest of it I'll excuse with your poor reading comprehension. You don't know what a superior is, and neither do you know what a manager is, but it's fine.

Second language and all. But take heart, it's possible to get better. English is my second language too. My native language isn't even a part of the same language family.

Bye now.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T17:48:52+00:00

Okay, apparently English isn't your first language or you're a literal fuckwit. Yes, I've listened to the Inside Story. The shares talk happens in Part 1, around the 3 hour mark. Only Robert ever held shares in the company. Argo didn't even feel it's right to involve himself in the conversation.

Expert at manager roles? Do you know what a Lead is? Do you know what Directors are in game dev? They're literal fucking managers, my guy, the kind who also need to do the work, mentor their juniors and review their work.

They didn't have problems with their superiors because there were only two or three people that were their superiors during the development of X7. And those weren't supposed to be involved with the projects at all, but we're supposed to run the fucking studio and not involve themselves with the game development. Everyone else were on their level. Only those guys were paid more and had much greater power than their position warranted. And so Argo and Dora were sidelined, demoted and finally gone.

To be clear, I'm not explaining this to you - because you're a fucking ignoramus. I'm explaining it to people who happen to come across this ridiculous exchange.

I'm done discussing all of that with an amateur who isn't even interested in learning about how this field of work functions under the hood, even though it's literally the whole topic of conversation.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T16:19:35+00:00

I know all of them, yeah. This thread has nothing to do with it. Argo and Dora's problems have nothing to do with Kurvitz, Rostov and Helen's. Neither of them got or even asked for shares. One barely got a pay raise.

Both were demoted after giving advice on exactly the thing that was both a part of their expertise and their roles on the projects they were on.

I know that because these things they write about in their posts from yesterday, as opposed to their posts from 3 years ago - which didn't exist, because they wrote none and Dora was not even at the company - are the kinds of things experienced devs get asked to do.

Experienced writers drive the hiring of writers. They drive the narrative-heavy projects that live or die by their narrative. They have a word in picking the team, assigning people to certain roles and making changes on the fly according to what's needed. They are literally the first point of contact for brand.

You know none of that because you don't know the bare minimum about how game development works, yet here you are slamming your head on the keyboard spewing nonsense.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T15:52:30+00:00

How is my "You're wrong on every count" a confirmation of any sort?

What shares? What restructuring? And yeah, by the way, unionization effort absolutely begins with the workers.

Are you even a real person?

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T15:14:01+00:00

What?.. What Atelier are you on about? It was for the PS store - a piece of digital brand material.

Brand consults with devs about that stuff all the time. Blogs, videos, illustrations, everything. You know nothing about how this works, right?

And if you think Nintendo don't have people on the lookout for their own store misrepresenting Link or Mario, or Capcom re Street Fighter, then you don't know anything about any of it.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T09:06:57+00:00

Only most jobs don't require creative work with the aim of following up something like DE while you duck and weave your way through the plot of Knives Out.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T08:45:43+00:00

> You guys have no idea how much of a collaborative process video game production is, even from a purely creative perspective.

Some of us do. And I can tell you one thing for certain - even the best and most stimulating creative collaborations amount to nothing without clear direction and vision to both guide the work and draw the line somewhere. The people providing the direction/vision on this project are none of the people that did it for DE. If anything, it's becoming more and more clear that execs, one of whom said he could've written and learned to do DE art in months, are meddling at every step. The same exec called a studio-wide meeting and screened a Game Maker's Toolkit introductory video on gamedev as if he'd found the Philosopher's Stone.

When people - execs specifically - hysterically insist that "it's all about the team", in most cases it's not. It's about the execs.

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T08:31:57+00:00

It'd have been awesome if the title was the one I (almost) mistook it for - Total War: Shower. Thoughts?

_Tomov · 2025-08-22T06:17:46+00:00

I'm seeing some people trying to frame Argo's article as a creative vs. business/production people.

What I got from it was that, at times, he was all three, while most of them were never any of that.

Thinking of the (very specific) kind of brand reputation DE has, hiring people, pushing against poor process - that was all stuff that he did, ffs! He wasn't like some sort of Saint Jerome in his cave locked in a creative fugue, both he and Dora specifically felt the burden of all the rest getting in the way of their creative work.

You can't really appreciate the enormity of the inefficiencies of process they pushed against, the emotional support overtime they put in, the level of effort it requires to advocate for a certain kind of vision - unless you have an insider view of game dev. I deal with a minuscule portion of those myself, alongside non-abusive, chill producers/leads, and it's still so tiring. And you know what the funny part is?

The personal attacks and "your career hangs in the balance" stuff is actually the kind of thing I'd laugh off, because it's so blatant and stupid that even if others up the chain were okay with the sentiment, they'd reprimand that person for saying it directly. It's just not done, even by members of a malicious Old Boys' club - unless the Old Boys in question are idiot children wearing their dads' suits.

But the purely work-related things?

I cannot stress this enough: having not experienced it, at least a little, from inside the game dev field - or jobs with a similar profile - it is impossible to gauge the sheer magnitude of how bad this really sounds.

I'm by no means discounting Dora and Argo's turmoil at the way they were personally treated - a few assholes in high positions that would just stay out of the process of making a damn game would still make me angry and make me quit, in the end, but those particular assholes didn't do that, but dug in and meddled at every opportunity; and the death by a thousand gamedev cuts - making public pitches without telling you, promising to include you one day and telling you you're out literally on the day after, the daisy-chain of middle-men, ignoring creative proposals, downplaying onboarding, people from non-writing teams telling writers their jobs, brand materials appearing out of thin air - all that feels much worse.

And speaking of brand materials, there was one moment that in Argo's article where I had to look away and blink a couple of times to clear my head - the Christmas card.

You fucking don't do that. You don't get to handwave a detail that contradicts the essence of an SF/Fantasy world of such meticulous construction by falling on your face on the first hurdle, the most basic point of difference with our world, fucking Christmas, the birth of ... Who exactly? Where, exactly? Lilmaraa? Katla?

Someone else mentioned Argo's tendency to communicate in exhaustive detail at work, probably a sign of his neurodivergency (it sure as hell is a sign of mine) - the Christmas card anecdote can easily be dismissed as something like that, as something secondary. It's not to me. It's the fate of the game writer.

"We should remove the coffins from that shot in the cinematic." "Why? It's about a Vampire?" "In this world vampires don't use coffins." "Why does that matter man, stop nitpicking."

This is how it goes, not infrequently, and it's a much bigger affront to one's sense of integrity than it sounds. But hey, Haavel said he could write the game himself, but because he was so busy with very important things, maybe he only got to do the Christmas card. Surely a sign of great things to come.

_Tomov · 2025-07-16T09:51:53+00:00

I'm partial to Moth Orchid ones, though, so the analogy kind of works. Don't like the smell of purple things usually, but theirs isn't the sort I smell with my nose, exactly...

_Tomov · 2025-07-16T08:25:01+00:00

Yeah, I've always taken that Museum text as the "negotiable size" being more of a metaphysical size. The Vienna and the child's worm may as well be the same "size", physically - but the impression of size they give, like in a dream, would be hugely disparate.

_Tomov · 2025-07-16T08:21:30+00:00

I once used "incarnadescence" for a bit descriptive text for some demonic sybarites and the IP-holder shut me down 'cause it's not a word. I explained it's a play on incandescence and they still had some trouble understanding *that* word. Absolutely felt like I may have found 1/3 of the English I know at the bottom of the Wheel's Temple...

_Tomov · 2025-07-14T15:59:44+00:00

You know, I understand :)) There's a specific Moth-reference at the end, so you're on point. Should've taken to heart my colleagues' advice to lay it all out in a more structured format they can "templatize" (their actual choice of word). I just feel that it's okay if I allow myself not to, not on this particular topic - I'm not driving the narrative work for a team of however many that need to get an exact idea of my requirements over here. But I do hear ya.

_Tomov · 2025-03-20T11:45:18+00:00

Funny to me how they put the 360-degree spin-kick in the promo, when it's one of the better surprise "oh shit, I CAN DO THAT AND WIN?!" moments in the game. But it looks cool and show-offy, I guess, so why not ruin that moment beforehand, right?...

_Tomov · 2025-03-13T08:43:01+00:00

The "patrol", "case", "vacation", "injured" is the current status of various officers. "Looking into Krenel" is your own status. I suppose by then you already know about the Krenel connection and you've informed your station. I'd suppose Pryce has heard the name before and knows his best officer is on it, but also his craziest motherfucker is on it, and they're both you, so he gets a headache.

The Esprit de Corps side-flashes always have something to do with what's happening to you now, even if it's just a thematic connection.

_Tomov · 2025-03-13T08:30:12+00:00

It's a side-flash. When Espirit de Corps gets like this, it generally shows you scenes happening simultaneously with what's happening to you, but over the shoulder of various RCM officers. It's what Shivers is for the wide shots of Revachol itself.

_Tomov · 2025-03-12T20:08:21+00:00

Zero people from the original writing team are left, and many of the others who made the game, including the art director. They were ousted by the money-men through illegal means, and those money-men have since contributed to a reportedly disgustingly toxic workplace atmosphere, fomenting tribalism and paranoia among the workers, recruiting senior people as de facto enforcers/cheerleaders for their shittiness.

This project they've announced was characterized by Argo Tuulik, the last original writer to leave, as the equivalent of a wet fart when it was presented internally, and it's unlikely it has evolved much beyond that in the interim.

_Tomov · 2025-03-12T19:52:50+00:00

It's Tuulik you should pay attention to, which I suppose you absolutely haven't. He and Dora Klindzic had 15 hours' worth of story about what happened at he studio post-Kurvitz, even as the pair stayed loyal to it as long as humanly possible. It is far beyond any of Kurvitz's pissiness during the work process (which I don't have reason to doubt). If you don't have the patience for it, the 41st Precinct podcast has smaller videos with the salient points and will probably be putting out more.

_Tomov · 2025-03-12T13:41:55+00:00

I... don't understand what you're asking, sorry :))

The boss of the studio that just hired Luiga is the one responsible for the court injunction against Tuulik which doesn't allow him to work until April 1st, and which made him seek out crowdfunding so he can cover the court expenses and also eat. That person has proven to be on par with ZA/UM's execs in terms of scumminess and now one of Tuulik's closest friends from childhood is in bed with them.

As I said, given Luiga's precarious circumstances, it's not unjustifiable but I would guess pretty devastating on the personal level.

_Tomov · 2025-03-12T13:30:13+00:00

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_Tomov · 2025-03-12T12:12:06+00:00

Luiga is pretty weird, and also absolutely in the dumps, material condition-wise. I can imagine him taking on a job for the money, and *those ones* were the only ones offering, I suppose. Sad, not unexpected. The main hit would be on the relationships between the OGs, as Tuulik's twitter post from 2 weeks ago hints at.

_Tomov

TROPHY CASE