✨crime🍃elemental✨ @hystericempress@plush.city

about me:

The name's Bea. I live in the PNW with a dog and several strange animals who typically wear human suits. My interests include tabletop RPGs, cooking, card games, boxing, and swordfighting. I have a large variety of OCs, most of whom satisfy my sick sexual thrills, largely revolving around expansion. I'm not looking for any additional romance or flirting, so don't bark up that tree. Cool? Cool.

also since this is relevant to my account: unless otherwise tagged as someone else, assume all art I post is done by @Daikanu

Pining for the specific era of JRPGs where 'Jesus as a bratty twink with cryptic motives' was a premier character archetype.

cw: vague eye contact

breaking: Nancy Pelosi expresses support for controversial 'Holes' initiative, believes forcing children to dig for outlaw treasure in dried lakebeds populated by venomous lizards will go a long way towards financially-supporting juvenile court system

so you can set up turn sequences like 'activate Demon Strength, make two attacks with Demon Cutter + Demon Splitter, inflict Vulnerable on my target; next turn, no attack, use action to activate Royal Guard to put myself in super armor, activate Limit Break: Split Heaven And Hell to charge a God-Cutting Blow, Hissatsu is live; next turn, activate Demon Strength + Hissatsu, fire God-Cutting Blow: Draken Cross and attack three times to obliterate every enemy in this encounter'

it's so fucking RAD

but you also have two other major properties: Demon Strength and Hissatsu

Demon Strength lets you upgrade ANY attack to a 'Heroic' version with boosted or different effects, but prevents you from attacking on your next turn Hissatsu, meanwhile, doubles damage for your NEXT attack if you DON'T attack on a turn

Hissatsu's activated version can stack with Demon Strength and Charge, fyi, and Demon Slayer ALSO gets a 'perfect block' move that makes you essentially invulnerable on off-turns

okay, I'm starting to Get the flow for Demon Slayer as a class, which is it's all about timing-based strings of charged attacks, which is like... hot DAMN, somebody's FINALLY making a tabletop game that plays like a spectacle brawler

the way it works is a lot of Demon Slayer's moves have a 'Charge' property, which boosts their effect if you take a 'slow turn,' IE, voluntarily going LAST in initiative order, which means you need to be careful about positioning to actually land one

going back through Beastars and man, this has a lot to say about the fact that love isn't magical, and won't miraculously solve your problems if you don't put in effort

but also, can't tell if Paru Itagaki has an ACTUAL oviposition kink or if this is just a VERY elaborate goof

more style experiments from @Daikanu; we decided to do my OC in Paru Itagaki's style for Beastars.

this version of Bea is ABSOLUTELY on the school wrestling team; everyone assumes she's involved with something sketchy but the reality is she's too unambitious for that

My secret is all my characters are dumbasses, it's just a matter of what KIND of dumbass they are.

The more I listen to it the more I think Ramlethal's theme is my favorite song on Strive's OST. I just ADORE everything it's doing; the prog rock synths, the smattering of Esperanto lyrics, the lilting, ethereal vocals. It's a breath of fresh air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trsbo1lCVMI

Fuck YOU, nature. No more nightsweats for this girl. Picked up an evaporative cooler with the Jeff Bezos monopoly money my family always sends for my birthday.

"If monsters are intelligent enough to be a character in their own right, treat them like they're actually people" is a rule I want stapled onto the soul of every RPG player on earth.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

LANCER DEVS RELEASED A NEW RPG

https://massif-press.itch.io/icon

and THAT'S the character themes, for the moment, covered. there's a few other themes like Crawl, the arcade mode boss theme, and whatever shows up in the DLC, but I'll get those another time.

In the end, staring down her doom, I-NO passes on her abilities to the original Megumi. It's a beautiful inversion of the story beat of Aria/Justice gifting her memories to Jack-O so Sol can find love again; here, she grants her own hated alternate her abilities because she wants at least SOME version of her to be happy. The song reflects that:

"If I am to be swallowed by fate / I must have fought well / Praying that it will become a seed of new life"

Which is where we get to the darkly poignant refrain: "We're falling down, slowly / like snow led by gravity / Fading away in the warm glow / Without resisting"

I-NO is... aware she's going to die. All of this, her whole life, has been leading up to this one last chance to make something more worthwhile of what she has, and she knows she isn't going to survive it. But she's comfortable with it; after all that struggle, she's come to a sort of peace with her fate.

Lines like "I flew high so that I could see everything" are followed up by "There is no up or down above the clouds / And I can't breathe"; I-NO is realizing all of this, everything she's done, was pointless. All her desperate attempts to control her situation, all her backstabbing, all her betrayals, have just left her in a position where she's even worse off than she started. She's so dissociated from her past and her own feelings that it's suffocating.

"When the sky cries in April / the flowers and trees smile in May /
The time that passes tells me many lovely things / But I can't feel it" is a particularly telling verse. I-NO, in short, is an alternate incarnation of Axl's girlfriend, Megumi, who is fully-conscious of her alternate's life and memories, but is also aware that none of those memories and feelings are experientially 'real' to her. She's eternally stuck being compared to a 'better version' of herself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkS-gBoPX9k

Okay. Here's the big one. This song is the payoff for everything else: I-NO's theme, Requiem. That title is NOT incidental: by the end of Strive's story, I-NO will be dead and gone, and this song is her laying out all her regrets, all her hopes, and all her motives, to the tune of a sweeping, operatic anthem that goes as hard as it possibly can, mood-swinging between bittersweet musings on memory and snarling anger towards her situation.