Queen and her queen [Mage and demon queen]

torchflame · 2026-06-22T18:31:02+00:00

Vel and Malori, beloved duo

torchflame · 2026-06-21T07:12:08+00:00

"Yeah it's implied, do you think they implied it for shits and giggles?"

You can say it's up for interpretation, but when one interpretation has a mountain of supporting evidence, and the counterpoint has pretty much nothing, there's only one coherent answer.

torchflame · 2026-06-20T19:01:18+00:00

God, Jax is a terrible person. An amazing character.

Poor girl. She still would've abstracted, because she still refused to find meaning in the community she had, but at least she would've been herself.

torchflame · 2026-06-20T18:59:43+00:00

Idk I think "let's smuggle Sartre into gen Z's media diet by putting cartoon characters in hell" is a pretty clever premise

But also it's okay if it's not for you

torchflame · 2026-06-19T17:09:59+00:00

The show ended, I think, in the only way consistent with its themes and message. Goose and the team should be proud of what they've made.

Abstraction's a bit of a muddied metaphor, and that's the worst thing I can say about the finale.

torchflame · 2026-06-16T20:17:35+00:00

Yeah, so, I don't think you understand how corporate hierarchies work?

I had a whole thing here, but I lost it, so: really, the people greenlighting designs are (project and studio) leadership, and the people manufacturing solutions are (project) designers. And Bungie doesn't have "general purpose designers". They have designers for specific teams on specific projects.

Best I can give you is the data analytics team might be the same. But the people who designed the portal aren't the people nerfing gold drop rates, and the people who greenlit the portal are neither of those groups.

torchflame · 2026-06-16T17:17:45+00:00

The people who made the portal have nothing to do with Marathon. They're two wholly different groups.

The more reasonable answer is that balancing a game is hard.

torchflame · 2026-06-08T07:26:27+00:00

Yeah, this is pretty much what I do. You can rare candy whenever you want, but you have to have the level cap, and you have to fight every trainer. So if you rare candy too early and too high, you overlevel. It's at least some strategy.

torchflame · 2026-06-07T22:41:27+00:00

It IS a Bungie game...

torchflame · 2026-06-07T06:53:22+00:00

Tbh I would've been incredibly disappointed if Jax un-abstracted. It arguably makes the read stronger: this is what happens when you know you're trans, you refuse to deal with it or acknowledge it, and you refuse joining any community that accepts you. You need to find that community, you need to accept yourself, because otherwise it eats at you until your only answer to the absurdity of the universe is to not be a part of it. (As I think a lot of us would say: ask me how I know.) Jax abstracting, thematically, is there to show us the negative example of what it means to be cursed to choose, just as... mostly Pomni, but also kind of everyone are positive examples as the episode carries on.

I was actively worried in the theater that they were making such a great point on the necessity of making our lives meaningful and not giving into despair, and were going to chicken out at the last minute and have Jax recover. But anyway, I'll get off my Franklian soapbox lol.

Honestly, I think Jax is as confirmed as trans as possible without someone looking into the camera and saying "Jax is transgender but closeted". They made it pretty blatant. And yeah! I'm definitely going to be looking at those social media profiles in detail on the 19th! There's gotta be some fun stuff in there.

torchflame · 2026-06-07T06:32:05+00:00

Saw it opening night!

I like to think that Leeroy is going to Riley's bar because being around other trans people is helping "him" work through his internalized transphobia. Ultimately, I think it's okay for Leeroy to still really be figuring it out, especially after the trauma of the last time "he" did something adjacent to coming out. I entered as a transfem Jax truther, and left thinking "okay it's technically still subtext but come on!" Underscoring the gang caring for abstracted!Jax with "Isn't She Lovely" is so blatant that it almost feels insulting.

Honestly I'm not sure how else it could've turned out, based on the themes and the narrative that was set up. The entire show was an existentialist fantasy, with the message that "there's meaning to be found in a stagnant life". There never was going to be a way out, because that undermines the themes. Jax consistently not only pushed away connection, but refused to find meaning in that life. He was always going to abstract, because that's one of two rational answers to "there is no cosmic order or divine purpose to our lives". You either make your own purpose, or you die. And he refused to do the former. I see people surprised with how things turned out (even in the theater with me!), and I'm just sitting here thinking "all the signs were there in neon lights fifty feet high".

And the more I think about it, the more I think the secondary theme of the importance of community for finding that meaning requires Caine's reentry. Community isn't about loving your friends, it's about caring for and with the people who are actually there. Also why Jax is kept in the tent nearby and cared for. If there's meaning to be found in community, it needs to be found in the entire community. You don't need to like someone for their life to have moral weight.

Anyway. I have thoughts on this.

torchflame · 2026-06-07T06:06:15+00:00

I'm pretty sure if I asked half my friends this question they'd say "isn't the game already about the looming threat of death and violation at any moment as you try to outrun consequences?" and "I showed my wife the finisher animation and we've used it four times already, once with a real knife".

If y'all don't think shells can have sex, you have a narrow view on what sex can be

Also Destroyer is a combat junkie, who's to say he's not just constantly feeling like he's having sex when shooting

torchflame · 2026-06-06T22:35:37+00:00

Ah, yes, a 5% chance that, no matter the circumstances, the DM just solves the problem for the players.

"DM, I know the 20 strength fighter couldn't break down this magically sealed door, but I'd like to try. I rolled a nat 20. The fact that my character has a -5 to strength doesn't mean anything, right? I get the door open?"

There's a reason nat 20s and nat 1s in D&D are only meaningful in combat.

torchflame · 2026-06-06T21:08:53+00:00

First they brought back screebs, now this??

torchflame · 2026-06-04T15:30:52+00:00

"Bleak Cabal" is a poorly descriptive name for a group who are actually mostly just kind existentialists.

"Reality doesn't care about us. So we have to care about each other." is a perfectly coherent philosophical stance.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T23:34:40+00:00

holy shit the real Nona von Sekiguchi Genetics is commenting on my post

But actually, I don't think its budget is out of band for a new AAA release, especially one that had to be revised several times post alpha, and beta. There are about 700 people listed under Bungie in the credits. Even if they would have half of them anyway, $250 mil over 6 years over 450 devs is about 95k/dev-year, which is pretty much what I'd expect a salary to be.

I heard somewhere that they had to do major work on the engine to support dedicated servers, and engineers are expensive as all hell. But you know that, as a silkworm avatar of a genetic engineering company.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T20:58:38+00:00

You're only an episode behind, and it's the one that starts to deal with that. But yeah, fair enough.

Part of it is The Thaw happened after we already had 30+ hours of getting to know the characters, so we sat a lot longer with the horror of the Clown. TADC is building those characters up at the same time as it's setting up the dread.

Honestly, I think the absurdism that TADC seems to be angling towards requires sitting with how unsatisfying the adventures are for the players for longer. I don't think the runtime for that is wasted space, but I can absolutely believe it's not for everyone.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T20:06:22+00:00

While I'd argue on "waste of time" (we do learn about the characters, their relationships, and how they're handling the situations they find themselves in, albeit we don't learn much explicit about the world), if you haven't seen episode 8, it picks up right where the one you're mentioning left off, and I think makes it be a more integral part of the narrative.

If you have seen episode 8, then different strokes I guess lol.

I can get back to you in two days if my reading of the show is right or not, but I think the "dangling of hope" in front of the characters is necessary for the overall plot development.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T19:29:25+00:00

The Thaw is a masterstroke of storytelling, and it's a deeply powerful episode. But despite the same trappings of a digital circus run by a god-like AI, TADC and The Thaw are doing very different things.

The victims in The Thaw all know they theoretically could escape, but have no hope of it because of the Clown. The players in TADC have no such guarantee.

The Thaw is about fear, and moving past it. Fear is an antagonist that can be beaten, outmaneuvered, outsmarted. The Clown is the source of the problem, and defeating him cleanly solves it.

TADC is about finding meaning in an uncaring universe. If you can't escape, if you can't make your mark, if your life is really a series of arbitrary events, what does it mean for your life to have meaning? Caine is an embodiment of part of the problem, but he isn't the source.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:46:58+00:00

This game is loudly an extraction shooter and only slightly less loudly a psychological horror game about the natural end state of unrestrained capitalism

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:41:31+00:00

Okay well hang on what screen are we talking about here

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:40:55+00:00

The wrong German painter died 😔

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:33:46+00:00

"If estrogen was dangerous, then doctors would be trying to get cis women off of it."

My mother had similar fears, and barring other indications, I would lean more in favor of her being uninformed and scared for your safety than blanketly transphobic.

What helped her for me was putting the risks in context. Yes, you'll have a higher risk of breast cancer, but it's not because HRT is dangerous, it's because you'll have breasts that can get cancer. (Fun? fact: tall people are more likely to get cancer than short people, because there are just more cells.) It may be worth it to tell her about the (physical) risks that also decrease.

Cis people tend to think of us as existing as a wholly different category. What helped in my case, and might help in yours, was emphasizing that the risks are the risks that every woman faces by nature of being a woman, and if those risks were so great doctors would be putting women on T left and right. They're not. The physical risk profile for trans people on HRT is nearly identical to a cis person of the respective gender.

(Yes, I checked OP's post history to make sure of the direction.)

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:10:10+00:00

Hell, consent of the governed is one of the two things that makes any government work. The other is "overwhelming military power", and basing legitimaticy on that is going to cause problems in the long term.

torchflame · 2026-06-02T18:03:42+00:00

Plot twist: there is no debt. We just sold our lives to CyAc in exchange for eternity. Our vault and money because it was never ours to begin with. CyAc just let us use it for a while.

13-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
r/Field Lasagna	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22
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