I found this line funny at first (since when have axel not complained about the icky jobs?) until I realized that in the timeline he started complaining about said dirty work at the end of 358/2 Days leading to 2, when he’s already forged a strong bond with his two friends and is forced to bring them back to a cult that’s trying to use them for malicious means, essentially
If you live in/near Arizona or just happen to be in the area for whatever reason and this place is still around, eat there and tell me what the food is like. I need to know this information.
Sadly, I’m a New Englander, but “literally the best character/enemy design in any SMT game ever” being used on a menu is still one of the funniest things ever.
I also remember seeing a van with an off-color Mario on it for some business (I think it was a cleaning business or something, don’t remember). Could never snap a pic though.
Dude, there’s literally a plumbing business in my Northwestern Georgia area that has what looks like a combination of Mario and David Bowie as the Thin White Duke on its billboards and trucks. Not to mention Marco, who I saw in a store once as a kid and thought to myself “…Mario? Are you undercover?”
There’s also this classic
The best of the Riders of Daein will defend your land to the last square inch.
“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” –Jorie Graham, in a conversation
My therapist literally handed me a kids book full of feelings words and said “pick some of these” when I just went ???? when she asked how I felt.
One of my biggest frustrations and to me one of the most clear and absolute dividing lines between people in my program who understood that children’s librarianship includes needing to know about child development and the needs of children’s developing brains and how cognition is developed and how to support it, and those who were in that track because They Loved Children’s Literature … .was how often I had to end up defending the bog-standard non-”inspired” photograph based books that are just basically long collections of words or word-use examples with illustrating images.
“Feelings” words books were and are high up on this list: people would gravitate towards those with ~*whimsical*~ and ~*artistic*~ imagery and I’m like no. Those are very pretty but for this purpose they are useless, and you should just get this pedestrian photograph-based one from Scholastic that was actually designed by some pretty fucking smart educators and kid-psychs so that the child does not have to decode YET ANOTHER RANGE of visually-encoded markers to translate that circle with another curved circle to mean “happy”.
Or do the same thing with recognizable figures (like from popular TV or movies) and short, simplistic storylines.
Like I love Great Children’s Lit and it also has its OWN importance and uses, and like I Miss My Hat and similar are all brill, but for the love of fucking god Olaf’s Friendship Book is also a hugely useful treasure and I will fight you.
There is only one way this scene works from a perspective standpoint:
Vanitas is definitely in the Land of Departure’s throne room.
But the decor on the archway is at the very top and the only way it works is if Vanitas is perched on top of the throne Ventus is sitting in. Like so:
Or he’s standing up, but he’s leaning on something so I assume his own knee.
Whoever he’s talking to is right in front and he’s looking down at them. This is definitely during Ventus’ awakening and they are gonna have a rude visitor.
I fuckin LOVE dialogue as a first line. I adore it. whenever I flip open a book and the first line is dialogue I’m like hell YES this is my SHIT
there’s lists of, uh, TOP TEN WAYS YOU SHOULD NEVER START YOUR NOVEL EVER and “opening with dialogue” is always on them
the gist being that it’s bad bc the reader doesn’t care about this character yet so why are they gonna care about this dialogue, right, they don’t have any context for it, you should start with something that gets the reader invested and emotionally pulled in, so on, so forth
(and I’m not here to argue or call bullshit on these lists or anything…… 99% of the time, the reasons listed of why you should Maybe Not Do The Thing are perfectly valid concerns and dangers that should be taken into consideration)
(this post is more a ramble about personal preference with a nice moral at the end)
(and definitely not a TOP TEN REASONS “TOP TEN WAYS YOU SHOULD NEVER START YOUR NOVEL EVER” LISTS ARE LIES AND SLANDER post god could you imagine)
but yeah, for me, dialogue opening lines pull me right the fuck in emotionally. for real. nine times out of ten they’ll yank me in and have me engaged instantaneously. always have, probably always will
(like come on. have y’all never just started eavesdropping right in the middle of some total strangers’ conversation on the bus. especially if it’s somethin weird. it’s so good)
but ANYWAY, the moral is uhhhh
whatever Mortal Writing Sin you wanna commit, there’s probably at least one weirdo out there possibly named logan who digs it
do whatever the fuck you want, honestly
you can write an opening scene that does everything every advice page tells you to do with an opening scene and it can still be shit
you can write an opening scene doing everything every advice page tells you NEVER to do with your opening scene and it can still be fabulous and engaging
if you can pull it off, literally who cares
“if you can pull it off, literally who cares“ is the only real writing rule
Plot Designing 