‘Star Wars’ and 'Harry Potter’ are two franchises that try to claim, textually, that it doesn’t really matter who your family is whilst showing subtextually that it unequivocally does matter who your family is.
subtext isn’t a thing dude
Welp, there’s my entire literature degree disproven.
[ID: a digital drawing of Sokka and Katara standing on a frozen lake. They’re both smiling facing the viewer and holding hockey sticks. Sokka is wearing a navy blue Water Tribe hockey jersey with a gray hoodie underneath and black hockey skates. Sokka has his hair pulled back in his signature wolf tail. Katara is wearing a black jacket and a light blue quarter zip sweater underneath it. The jacket has her name written in tiny white letters on the right and the arm has a white Water Tribe symbol on it. She is wearing her hair down and she also has black hockey skates on. The second image is a closer crop of Sokka and Katara from the first image. End ID.]
see shit like this is the reason that it’s so hard to turn my back on this website. Where else, pray tell, are you going to find this kind of quality nonsense.
I’m watching chamber of secrets with my bf and the scene Harry’s scar came on and he just turned to me and touched my forehead and went “forgive me…. but ur pop tart scar…..it’s legendary…” and I’m never going to fucking hear the end of this am I
Me: touches it
Him in a British voice: it’s hurting again isn’t it?
This is funny and all, but I would very much like to know what happened
I put pop tarts in the toaster oven and burnt my first batch got kinda pissed and made another batch and put them on a plate and got a glass of milk and tried going downstairs when I missed the first step out of agitation I fell down the entire flight of stairs spilling milk all over the place all the way down and at some point I broke the plate in half over my face and dropped my tarts went back upstairs made a third batch and only cried once
after two pop tart disasters they went back for a third. Braver than any US Marine.
I think if “eccentric billionaire” is going to continue being an archetype we should have fewer characters like Tony Stark and more characters like Seto Kaiba
to expound upon this a bit for people who didn’t watch yu-gi-oh growing up, Kaiba’s backstory is that him and his brother were orphans who were adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturer, Gozaburo Kaiba, after Seto bet Gozaburo that he could beat him in a game of chess and won (and yes, every plot point in Yu-Gi-Oh is Like This).
Even though he had taken them in because of a lost bet, Gozaburo realized Seto was pretty smart and started training him to be his successor. He made him study tirelessly, day in and day out, to not just be a genius with extensive knowledge of math and technology, but the kind of ruthless, cold-hearted corporate asshole that would be perfect to run a giant defense contractor. Thing is, Seto was like… 14 so he didn’t want to make weapons…
he wanted to make BOARD GAMES….
and maybe like a theme park or two. This caused some tension between him and his adopted dad and several ridiculous plot points later, Seto used the same scummy business tactics that Gozaburo taught him to turn the old man’s executives against him and take control of the company, leading to this hilarious sentence from the Yu-Gi-Oh wiki
and ever since he took over, Seto has been using his massive pile of left-over blood money to produce nothing but extremely hi-tech gaming peripherals to make playing Duel Monsters (the card game the series is based around) more exciting to watch. And when he’s not doing that, he’s running massive tournaments for duel monsters, or creating entire academies where people study duel monsters. So much of the scale of yu-gi-oh is a result of Kaiba’s willingness to spend ungodly amounts of money on literally anything duel monsters related.
Oh and he’s also a huge, self-centered asshole because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of Gozaburo’s training definitely stuck with him.
The reason I say we need more Seto Kaibas and fewer Tony Starks is because a lot of “eccentric billionaire” types, particularly in comic books, are wealthy men who see some form of injustice in the world that governments and other institutions simply cannot, or refuse to deal with, and so they take it upon themselves to use their vast money and resources to single-handedly solve society’s problems. This is something that literally never happens.
Kaiba, on the other hand, only spends his infinite money on goofy vanity projects that exist primarily for his own amusement. Which means, despite everything about him and the series he’s in being completely absurd, Kaiba is, in a way, actually more true to life, because that is exactly the way that actual eccentric billionaires operate.
the dm is also a player and i need everyone to understand this. you cant just expect them to do everything they should be having fun as well even if they have put more work into the sessions like its so much more fun and refreshing to play with people who carry on conversations with npcs, roleplay long scenes amongst themselves and like Initiate things without me having to step in!!! im not gonna do everything for you!! engage with me but dont expect me to play the game for you
i run/ran so many games where people are just not paying attention to me “tell me when its my turn” is the worst thing to say ever, and like its so bad to watch people joke amongst themselves and just ask me for directions or how hot a character is
Okay but if I’m gonna reblog this I need to tell you guys the story of this legendary pachirisu
So in the competitive Pokemon scene, there’s what’s called a ‘metagame’, which is what’s generally used and what is/isn’t allowed in competitive battling. Certain pokemon are banned from the ‘meta’ because of being too powerful. Others aren’t generally used because there are better alternatives, or they’re simply too weak. People base their entire strategies around the expectation that they’ll be facing certain pokemon, and attempt to counter them with certain pokemon.
But the problem with this meta is, during the 2014 World Championships, there were a small number of pokemon choices that everybody had. Gardevoir, Kangeskhan, Salamence, Tyranitar, Talonflame, Garchomp… the same pokemon coming up again and again. Things weren’t really all that interesting.
And then came the Double Battle World Championship. And this guy.
Park Se Jun. One of the best players in the world. He used a Pachirisu with Nuzzle (a move with 100% paralysis chance), Super Fang (cuts target’s HP in half) and Follow Me (a move that redirects attacks AWAY from allied pokemon), and equipped with a recently-buffed Sitrus Berry. And he turned the metagame on its head, because nobody in the championships had prepared for anything outside their incredibly restrictive expectations.
Their strategies and planning were completely tripped up by an electric squirrel. Battling his Pachirisu in incredibly tight synergy with the rest of his team, Park Se Jun swept the finals and became World Champion of 2014 Doubles.
And that is the story of the #BASED GOD PACHIRISU.
To give more details on Pachirisu and this Pachirisu in particular:
Pachirisu’s stats aren’t great. They aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great. Of the four Pokemon involved in this particular exchange, Salamence and Garchomp have a base stat total of 600, Mega Tyranitar has 700, and Pachirisu has 405. Yeah.
To make things worse, Pachirisu is a gimmick Pokemon of a class known as a “Pikachu clone”. Its entire purpose is to be a generic Electric-type with middling stats and chubby cheeks. It was never built for high-level play, and a lot of people will even say that it’s not worth it for casual because there are so many better Electric-types.
Pachirisu does have a couple of things going for it, though. Firstly, its Special Defence and Speed stats aren’t totally garbage, and its Defence isn’t bad either. This means that it can take a hit if you train it right (which Se Jun did).
Secondly, the moveset that this particular Pachirisu had was a brilliant one for what Se Jun wanted it to do. Nuzzle deals a tiny amount of damage but is guaranteed to paralyse anything that isn’t an Electric- or Ground-type. Paralysis halves speed and gives you a 50/50 chance of not being able to do anything that turn.
That’s HUGE. This is a game in which most major attackers are fast as hell, and outspeeding is vital to pretty much all strategies.
Super Fang, as mentioned, is guaranteed to do 50% damage to anything that’s not a Ghost-type. Pachirisu cannot explicitly KO with this, but what it can do is break down its opponents’ defences. You can’t use inventory items in competitive play, so it’s unlikely that this damage will be healed, and 50% damage can make the difference between Pachirisu’s partner taking two moves to defeat its opponent vs taking one move.
Follow Me redirects opponents’ moves onto Pachirisu if they would have otherwise hit Pachirisu’s partner. This lead to the instance above, in which Pachirisu survived a hit from a Draco Meteor (a 130 power attack in a game where 90 power is considered excellent and 100 power or above generally requires major drawbacks). You might think “but if it couldn’t take out Pachirisu, then it couldn’t take out the Salamence it was meant for, right?” NOPE: Salamence is weak to Dragon-type attacks like Draco Meteor and so would have taken double damage. That’s probably a KO.
But the real purpose of Follow Me was for Pachirisu’s intended partner: Gyarados. Depending on the situation, Gyarados takes either double or quadruple damage from Electric-type attacks, which is a shame because Gyarados is otherwise terrifying. Pachirisu has the passive ability Volt Absorb, which means that it’s healed by Electric-type attacks rather than taking damage from them. So if you try to use an Electric-type attack on that Gyarados there’s a very good chance that you will end up healing Pachirisu instead. Not what you want, especially when this particular Pachirisu is so unbelievably bulky.
Oh, and its last move is Protect, which totally nullifies damage on Pachirisu for that turn. Useful if Pachirisu can’t do anything useful this turn but you don’t want to swap it out.
And that Sitrus Berry? Yeah, that thing recovers 25% of Pachirisu’s total HP the moment it goes below 30% total. So if you just barely fail to kill Pachirisu, it’s going to heal itself. Have fun.
The last thing Pachirisu has going for it, at least in this case, is intimidation. The universal response to this team was “Who the fuck brings a fucking Pachirisu to the World Championship?!” But then you realise that Se Jun is totally serious about this ridiculous plan. And then you realise that it’s working. And then you realise: oh shit, this guy is really good. He knows what he’s doing with this.
TL;DR: By all accounts Pachirisu should have been an utterly stupid thing to bring to this level of play, but in practise it was a very clever set-up that took advantage of its decent defensive stats and useful support/survival movepool.
