Arc 4

[SkyCladSaya06]

Well, no Scythe yet. The movie sounds interesting. It kind of reminds me of a movie where the characters all needed to take a test and were given blank papers and specific instructions that if they fail to follow, they fail the test. Never really finished that movie actually. For now, I need to start focusing on passing my thesis retake.

And...I hope it's an indicator of things looking up for the better...got sudden luck in both versions of Grand Order.

For NA, I managed to roll Hercules in the starter roll, Siegfried in a random roll and Lancelot in a rate-up. Chose Emiya for the free 4-star since I'm lacking Archers but a random Quartz roll later...



...Self-explanatory guys. THIS.IS.HIM. The extremely overpowered a-hole of the Fate series as well as the most powerful of all proper Servants (barring Grands and Irregulars) decided to descend on my account. Yeah!!! My US Fate/Grand Order account's looking up.

As for my original Japanese account which had been plagued to receive nothing but Silvers and CE, I managed to get a second D'eon, 5-star Rider Francis Drake (third priority level up though. Need to level Kintoki and Ozzy first) and then...



Waver! Probably the best support you can get in this game (outside of Merlin who's limited). The Gacha gods finally decided to give me a powerful support to help my silvers and bronzes.

Hope this luck carries over to my defense!

[DeathScythe386]

forgive the lack of scythe here, a lot of shit happened. XD

I got some training going on, and I guess some bullshit happened with my weak as fuck bod being forced to endure several push-ups...so I had sore as fuck arms and a bruise on my knee and I got sick over the weekend. But now I managed to post so reactions are in order. XD

@Saya awww no drake screenshot? XD In any case, now all you need JAlter and Merlin and you got the meme squad. XD My old friend Bloode is still trying to get Gilgamesh so lucky you. XD

@Guardian Sounds like a fun movie. XD I'm still hung up over NDRV3 but have mostly forgiven Chapter 4 (I STILL DON'T FORGIVE OUMA FUCK--//shot) so that's a thing. XD

Post news: KanaMisa bonding because I needed to show roommate bonding somehow. Also this is Kanade's small attempt at being a good roommate mercy being displayed to a scrub. XD Hayato walking home agreement, and Kujo worrying. XD

EDIT: thanks to the officers throwing a party, i'm slightly more energized so I managed to throw this together:



pose was based off of Revolution Nature: The Great King Epidemic in which some poor sap who hates the way things go in his country magically becomes the king of his country the next day. I saw Ousama...
and fuckit the fanbase wants ouma anyway

Used the scrum debate sprites for references on the hair because how the fuck does ouma's hair even work??
yay i finally know how to expression
i dont know how male uniforms work and
i still have not forgiven ouma for chapter 4 he's cool i guess. His cape wasn't as floofy and I barely managed to hide his other arm. I fucking forgot about his hat and drew it on at the last minute. XD

[SkyCladSaya06]

Luck really pushed through this week as I finally passed my thesis!!! Yay! Now, I'm officially changing my status from student to unemployed XD. Hahaha, hope to find employment soon. But for now, I kind of just want to take a bit of a break after the very hellish and stressful week of thesis. Maybe one or two weeks of rest.

Granted all my jurors were professors, being able to pass is still a feat given that 3 out of 17 of us who took the thesis special term still failed to pass. I was able to pass with a relatively good grade considering the difficult standards one has to fulfill.

Hehehe, now the Gold gacha pulls seem very worthwhile now~ Funny thing is, as if to congratulate me or something, my Japanese Grand Order game also gave me Mordred, Gawain and Tristan! I finally rolled my most favorite Saber! Bedivere can now retire...not. Even with Mordred and Gawain around, I'll be keeping him. He carried me through all those Lancer mobs when no Gold Saber would answer my call. Plus, he's cool. Cooler than even Gawain and Mordred in terms of character.

Sadly, no screenshots since my phone can be shit at times. We still need to submit a CD and book to our head office tomorrow so I can't really broadcast my thesis anywhere else yet but once it's done, I promise to show you guys at least the 3D rendering I did of it.

@Scythe I remembered my military training in first year upon hearing that. Yeah, the drills can get very tiring. It's a lot more fun when you get to actual military nitty and gritty though like rifle assembly and disassembly, firing and obstacle courses. :)

Kazenari musings and Aziz falling asleep. Makoto and Cel aren't home yet. I think we should just collab HayaKaze interaction and post it as a whole in order to move the day forward dont'ya think?

[Guardian Aelita]

Congrats on completing your thesis!! I'm glad you managed to get done in one piece~ I can only imagine how stressful and hard it was. I'm going through a similarly hard thing since my final for History is coming up. Unlike the other History tests I had, I don't get to use a computer. Instead, I need to write down words and with my bad handwriting, my ideas might not get across clearly. Luckily for me, I'll be taking time out of the weekend to write rough drafts and an outline so that the actual paper can be good. But good job on Grand Order! Seems like the RNG gods love you so far~ XD I was a bit stuck on the post due to a pool party yesterday (that I kinda regret because I got a sunburn and the people who I didn't know were complete douches) and just general writer's block. I was tempted to add Chi but that would just hold back us advancing so I'm saving her for tomorrow in the roleplay. For now, I realized that Noa and Yoite had a bit of a loose end and I fixed it and that was my post. So, it's up to you guys to move the day forward! XD

[Guardian Aelita]

Um...? Hello...? It's really quiet here... Sorry if I did something to annoy you... I'm lonely... :( Well, I guess to kinda bump this along on the very strong hope that the message system at least notifies that someone posted on the OOC, I'm going to post a small post on this movie I saw called Valerian and post a couple of character designs I made along with brief descriptions of each character. Whether they turn into official characters on here or just remain as designs, I'm not quite sure yet. Anyway, Valerian first. XD

So, Valerian is about two galactic federation members who are investigating a supposedly radiated spot and gather technology from a planet where supposedly all members of the race were wiped out. Short version, don't watch it. But if you do watch it, only watch it for the very beautiful cinematography and eye candy because holy shit, this is a bare bones as fuck story. Valerian fills the archetypal badass who gets shit done but is a rebel and his partner, Laureline, is his sexual-tension filled partner who's the goody two shoes smart person with resting bitch face who acts like she hates him when she really wants to fuck him. Maybe I'm just burdened by reading way too much fanfiction, but I'm getting really sick of the bad boy/good girl pairing and these two are not helping matters. Helping less is that Laureline's actor cannot act to save her goddamn life. At one point, Valerian gets lost in a dead zone and instead of freaking out or crying, she looks really goddamn annoyed at the situation. Also, any and all plot twists will be obvious or even flat out spoiled for you. There was one scene where some member of the conspiracy apparently died under mysterious circumstances and then it just cuts to a random flashback of the dude getting shot, leaving absolutely no mystery as to how they died. Fuck. Basically, only see this if you want to see beautiful looking scenery but don't quite feel like having a good story to go with it. Onto the characters I made! XD

Fuji Amori - I'm basically in the process of making twin characters and since Fuji is the oldest, I've developed her a bit more than I did Machi. Fuji lives with her twin Machi and their single mother. Her mother works three jobs to raise enough income for all three of them so Fuji's in charge of cleaning, cooking and taking care of Machi. Fuji's very stressed and tries her best with Machi but her optimism has dwindled to about zero and she gets easily annoyed. That said, she does want some form of freedom and how she's going to get that freedom, I'm not entirely sure yet.

Machi Amori - Machi is the younger twin sister of Fuji and is a bit of a space case. She was born without her lower left leg and wears a prosthetic leg underneath tights due to insecurities about her missing leg. She's highly dependent on her twin sister due to lack of a mother and father figure and is scared to develop as her own person outside of Fuji. That's all I got for her. XD

Unknown - Yeah, I don't know either, I just made a design and thought it looked cool. Lemme know what you guys think. XD

And that's it for me. Please come back... I was really liking the story...

[Guardian Aelita]

I am not a very happy person at the moment. So, as all of you are probably aware, I want to be a teacher at some point in my life. I hold an extreme amount of empathy towards babies, children and teenagers as they are all looking for guidance in the world and some people just need some help getting there. I also feel it's important that by helping these children, you do not scar them psychologically, you do not abuse them physically, and you sure as fuck don't kill them in a fit of rage. After seeing Kingsman, a movie I was looking forward to, and after seeing all of these things being implied to have happen if not outright happening, I have absolutely no desire to see the second movie coming out this year. Let me get into my reasoning as to why I feel this way. Is it petty? Well, yes, but by default, I'm a very emotional person and my arguments could be considered extremely biased but let me just try to convey why I personally feel enraged by this movie. I'll start with what enraged me the least but still enraged me and work my way up from there.

Physical Abuse: So the main character, Eggsy, is abused by his step dad after his actual dad died in the Kingsman. He is punched, yelled at and treated like dirt by this absolute scumbag of a person. I'm not so much enraged by this as sadly, it's become common domain at least in movies where I live that the main character is abused physically by his parents in some way. Sometimes it leads to them being better people than the abusive parents, other times the main character becomes a psychotic serial killer (which is actually what commonly happens). It's still a problem but it's a trope at this point. My real issues come later.

Psychological Abuse: Eggsy escapes his parents and is drafted into the Kingsman and is training to become one. You'd expect he'd be treated at least somewhat better there. HAHAHAHA NOPE. Drowning, falling from a helicopter to their demise, being tied down and about to be hit by a train unless you tell your attacker what the Kingsman are, and adopting a dog since it was a puppy only to be told you have to kill it in order to pass and become a Kingsman. By the last one, I was done with these British assholes. I get that being a Kingsman requires a lot of heavy shit to happen as part of a government agency, but this is just fucking ridiculous. The dog isn't going to be a fucking Russian spy and since this was probably a test to see if Eggsy could handle any order, I would have shot the guy giving the order in the first place. Yes, it's revealed that the bullets in the guns are blanks. But no, I don't give a fuck, that's still going to traumatize the fuck out of Eggsy psychologically amongst all the other shit you're throwing on him. Roxy shooting her dog offscreen doesn't make this any easier as she was forced to "kill" an animal that she raised for so long.

Rage virus: Oh fucking boy, the doomsday thing that'll ruin the world. And oh god, did it do a good job at that. The virus that the main bad guy, Valentine, used to take over the world is an iPhone signal that lowers inhibitions but raises rage. This equals a lot of violence against a lot of people, lovers trying to kill one another and, here's my favorite part, a mother trying to kill her fucking infant with a cleaver. And yes, you do get to see her hack down the door while the infant is screaming in terror from the other side. It was at that point, near the end of the movie, that I gave up on Kingsman. At that point, my instinct to protect that child from its abusive as fuck mother and my heart is enraged at the directors of the movie and Mark Fucking Miller, the guy who wrote the comic that the movie was based off of, for putting an infant through this trauma! I don't care if after the virus got released, the mother tried to comfort the child and reassure her that she'll never hurt her daughter, because that's not fucking true. What I got out of this is that lowering inhibitions only makes you do what you really want to do but are too scared of the consequences to do. Adding on top of that raising up the rage factor and you have yourself a mother who secretly wanted to kill her infant daughter the whole time. This might be just me looking into it too deeply when it's just a mind control thing, but it got me so pissed off that at this point, I don't even fucking care.

So yeah, I'm way too emotional about movies and I care too much about children and dogs to ever want to see any other iteration of this franchise. Sorry for wasting your time but I just needed to get the rage out without screaming. So, there you go.

[DeathScythe386]

hoo boy i have a lot to catch up on

In any case, I'm back from radio silence with a Hayato post while the fire's still burning hot. I'll write a longer OOC post than this when I'm a little more coherent, but while my fire's still burning I'm going to try to write a thing in the Writing Lounge just to stretch the typing muscles again. XD

[SkyCladSaya06]

@Aeli-chan Hey, it's cool. No point in watching something if it makes you uncomfortable.

@Scythe Yep. You sure do.

Anyone have a Discord? It's kind of like a chat app I guess. I tried an RP where they communicated through this one and it seems great. Why don't we give it a shot? I made a channel: https://discord.gg/gnRWpFC

Just jump in when you're ready. It'll allow us to communicate faster if needed.

[Guardian Aelita]

So begins my Death Note Analysis series. This should be plenty of fun and hopefully I can see what exactly was good about this show or if it still holds up. XD

1. Rebirth

Synopsis: The series itself opens up with a swooping in shot that leads in to the Shinigami World. We’re given focus to this one Shinigami named Ryuk who appears to be bored out of his mind while the other Shinigamis are either gambling or asleep. As if to form a mirror or parallel image, we cut to the main character of the story Light Yagami. He reads off a passage from the bible in English and looks completely annoyed at the antics of his classmates around him. Both Light and Ryuk monologue to themselves about how rotten the world is. After the title is shown, Light is staring out the window and sees the Death Note fall from the sky and onto the ground. He gives it a quick look over before putting it back… only to get second thoughts, pick it up again and take it back to his place. He reads over a couple of rules for the Death Note, primarily that the human whose name is written in the notebook will die and that after 40 seconds of writing a name, the person will die of a heart attack. After some internal debate, Light goes through with it and writes the name of a person who is holding an elementary school hostage in the notebook. Sure enough, 40 seconds later, the kidnapper is dead. But, Light’s still not convinced and needs to see it happen for himself. On his way to Cram school, Light expresses his disgust for humanity after seeing a bully harass one of his classmates for money. He then sees a woman about to get raped by a biker man and writes that that man will die of an accidental death. Sure enough, as the woman gets away, the biker man gets on his bike and a truck collides into him, killing him instantly. We see Light’s shocked face and then Ryuk from the Shinigami world says that he has to get going before the cue cards appear.
After the slides, Ryuk reveals that it’s been 5 days since he last dropped his notebook and says that he’d better get going. His Shinigami counterparts laugh at him leaving and dropping the notebook despite having two notebooks but Ryuk says that he dropped it in the human world before entering the human world. While he’s flying to find his dropped notebook, Light arrives home to present his mother with the results of his mock exam. Apparently, he’s number one in the entire country of Japan. He says he’s going to study when really, he’s just admiring the notebook and how many names he’s written down. Ryuk’s voice cuts in, saying that Light took to the notebook and after Light gets initially startled, he calms down and says he’s been expecting Ryuk. Ryuk is a bit surprised but is even more surprised at how many names Light has written down. Light expects some punishment for his actions but Ryuk tells him that the notebook belongs to him now. Ryuk also tells Light that he’ll feel the fear and pain that all Death Note users went through and that Ryuk will be the one to write Light’s name in the Death Note when he dies. Light’s mother then walks up to Light’s room to give him some apples from the neighbors. His mother is also quite unaware of Ryuk’s presence as she can’t see him. As Ryuk enjoys the apples, Light demands to know why Ryuk dropped the notebook for him. Ryuk tells Light that it was out of boredom and that anyone could have picked it up, hence why the rules of the notebook are written in English, the most common language. Ryuk just wanted to have some fun, so, why not enter the human world? He then questions Light why out of all the names he wrote down, only the motorcyclist had a cause written. Light explains that it’s all part of making people understand that someone is wiping out the criminals of the world. His reasoning? Light was bored as well. He was bored and sick of all the scum polluting the earth and wants to create some form of justice. In order to do that, he needs the notebook and he feels he’s the only one who can do it. After this, Ryuk says that Light will be the only bad guy left, while Light counters that he’ll instead be the god of the New World. Ryuk says that humans really are interesting and then the credits roll.
Characters:
Light Yagami: Light seems to be a little bit of a sociopath right from the get go. I can understand being bored of society. Trust me, it ain’t perfect. But with how quickly Light took to the Death Note and how he wrote what I’m assuming to be at least 100 names down, he really seemed to be wishing for something like this to happen. The fact that he’s incredibly smart too and knows not to write down names of anyone close to him or related to him in any circumstances make me a little nervous as to what the world today would be like if someone like him really does exist. Outside of that, looks wise, he’s easy on the eyes but I assume it’s just a mask to hide the twisted and ugly heart that beats within him. Still, let’s see where the whims of this future god will take us.
Ryuk: Ryuk seems like that one shitposter. The one who does shit just for the lulz. He just up and drops the notebook to see whoever gets it. In that sense, he feels like a passive observer. I hope that more can be developed for his character but so far, he seems to be interesting enough on his own. Also, when he ate apples in the human world, he found them juicy. Where does that leave the apples in the Shinigami world?
Positives: This is definitely a way to start up a series. You have a pretty morally grey character who thinks he’s morally white, you have a way to set up a series of events through a book that fell from the sky, you have an observing death god whose motives are simple and understandable and then you have the grey character declare that he’s going to become God of the new world. Honestly, this is how you set up a story proper. You don’t just pander with tits and ass or you don’t meander all over the place and go nowhere. You introduce the setting and main character from the jump and just let the series play out its course.
Negatives: Was Light seriously the only one to see the notebook fall from the sky and on the floor? Was everyone just so self-obsessed with their own problems that they didn’t look down and go “Oh look, there’s a thing that looks weird. Better report this to the school board!”
Light talks to Ryuk during their exchange and Light’s mom just… doesn’t hear any of it? I think any sane mother would wonder “who is my son talking to and why is he laughing like a maniac?” Unless he soundproofed his room for the purposes of studying? I don’t see any sign of soundproofing the room so that’s probably not it. Maybe his voice doesn’t travel through the room?
Overall Thoughts: Outside of a couple of nitpicks I had, the show had a fantastic start so far. I’m already looking forward to the next episode and hopefully it can deliver just as much as this one did.
Score: 9/10