it’s really funny to me that karkat made a shipping diagram to save the human race and just how badly it went wrong. rose is a lesbian, john dated her mom, jade was gone for three years and karkat himself dated dave. what a fucking clusterfuck
i was wrong about a lot of endgame ships but at least i wasn’t as wrong as karkat
i have to go through all the lectures for the semester and i just remembered im really mad about the week 4 digital art lecture
im getting an art degree and im STILL getting told off for drawing in class smh
Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
Concept: an otome dating sim where the player character is a bizarre Lovecraftian monstrosity – except none of the boys notice, and they all treat you like you’re a perfectly ordinary teenage girl.
All of your dialogue options are incomprehensible hissing and gurgling, or cryptic gestures with unearthly appendages; you’re never 100% certain what – if anything – you’re communicating, though the boys seem to understand you.
Rather than “Athletics” or ‘Charm”, your stats have strange names like “Viscosity”, “Amplitude” and “Bulk”. Figuring out what they actually do is as much as part of the challenge as figuring out how to raise them.
At the end of the game, you devour whichever boy you have the strongest bond with whole; this act of consumption determines the final form you evolve into, as well as the nature of the resulting global apocalypse.
This game would have a very active walkthrough/wiki community, I’m sure.
Would there be a gay option?Blasphemous star-spawn don’t really adhere to human gender modes, so I suppose eating a boy alive can be gay if you want it to be.
Are there any female routes, or are the starspawn somehow drawn to male identifying individuals?
Nah, the fact that they’re all boys is purely genre convention. You could take it more than one way, of course, but as I picture it, this game would be articulating a very specific critique of the genre it’s sending up.
Basically, one of the more common criticisms of the otome dating sim genre is the tendency for such games to deprotagonise their own player characters. In spite of being the game’s ostensible protagonist, you’ll often end up acting as a passive sounding-board for a rotating cast of self-absorbed assholes, with no particular agency of your own.
Here, we take that flaw to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion, with a cast of boys who are so monumentally self-absorbed that they literally don’t notice they’re dating a writhing gorebeast. Likewise, they’re unphased by your incomprehensible communication style not because they can magically understand you, but because they weren’t really listening anyway: they only hear what they expect to hear.
Of course, it all comes to a head in the ending, when it transpires that you didn’t really care about their petty drama, either; you were looking for suitable raw material to fuel your apotheosis, and your chosen boy’s story is cut short with no resolution for him, not even the consolation prize of understanding why you chose him.
Now, none of this necessarily precludes a yuri route – but if you wanted to maintain the integrity of the central gag, interacting with a girl would have to play out very differently from interacting with a boy.
@illumened @kira-2501 @cel-anrice @siderial @fueled-by-nightcore
