#starbtag

finally, FINALLY got a chance to start purging my starb screenshot archive to an SD card and it genuinely feels like having an evil presence cleansed from my phone lmao

#starbtag

where's that one meme where the guy sends his friend 200 turkey emojis in a row, the friend goes '[inhales. exhales] i forgive you,' and the guy goes 'hold on' and starts sending more turkeys. i can only hope that is my beloved mutuals' experience when i put starb cognitohazards on the tl

#starbtag

this btw is one of the primary things that makes me hate starb so much. it is joss whedon 'being a cishet white man who finds female characters to be worthy of my consumption makes me and my work feminist. i am the lorax and i speak for the women (who i hate)' bullshit ON STEROIDS

#starbtag

one particular rake starb keeps stepping on is that like. it keeps trying to quarantine most of its meaningful engagement w/the concept of race and racism to Fantasy Metaphor, to avoid owning the optics of the fucking insane things it has to say about the subject.

but. it's URBAN fantasy

#ffxivtag #starbtag

tl;dr equivalent for my ffxiv moots, from what i understand: imagine if three or four expansion-specific sidequest cutscenes--sometimes straight up MSQ patch cutscenes--were locked behind 100%ing each mogtome event. with no reruns, and no break between mogtome events. forever

#starbtag

me, after spending an hour writing a 21-post-long thread explaining the memory event mechanics in starb: thank god now i don't have 'i should explain how this works sometime so i can refer back to it to better articulate rachel's character assassination' rolling around in my head anymore

#starbtag

one thing i find myself wondering often, bc i mostly avoid games that center gacha to a story-significant degree and therefore i'm lacking in familiarity w/how that plays out, is how much of starb's memory event system being a terrible idea is Unique vs 'yeah gacha games are Like That'

#starbtag

one of my simultaneous bugbears and trainwreck fascinations is a cutesy little cozy game where the main character is revealed to be *a reincarnation of witch goddamn hitler* (spoiler: they handle it TERRIBLY in every possible way they could have), up to the point of EXPLICITLY ALLUDING

#starbtag

LRP CAINPOSTS OF ALL TIME. GOD.

#starbtag

many, many things about obsidian sanctum and the chapters leading up to it are an absolute mess. the silver lining of it all is Canon Cain Whump Babey

honestly i am putting this one in #starbtag special just bc it is a crowning jewel of how fucking ballsy this game gets about hero-worshipping *actual fucking hitler,* to a degree of intent that goes WAY past Accidental Osmosis of Cultural WW2 Knowledge, while pretending to preach leftist values lol

#starbtag

this kind of thing is a running pattern with this game and it is ONE OF THE CREEPIEST FUCKING THINGS I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE. it's one thing to not catch something initially, but i have never EVER seen someone who played this game go 'yikes i see what you mean now that you point it out'

#starbtag

god it is so fucking healing to see other people saying All the Stuff I Just Reposted out loud, i was just thinking all that earlier. it's cathartic in general and also in the moment feels like having gunk hosed out of my brain about starb's poisonous attitude toward rape/abuse survivors

#starbtag

i love how this game just constantly refuses to engage with or acknowledge its coding of cain as not only an immigrant, but a racially marked one, EXCEPT when it can do a LEAVE HER ALONE 😤 moment (at characters who i Guarantee you will be getting a sob story abt it ~10 chapters from now)

#starbtag

had a whole thread i was gonna write about starb and amatonormativity, got sleepy 😔 the short version is that they keep shoving characters at each other in bizarre forced matchups bc a character HAS to have a romantic interest of some kind before they're allowed to Do Things in the Plot

#starbtag

to wit:

-it's a big unspoken point of tension when she and rachel are introduced that you aren't sure if rachel is assuming things about aubrey's expectations of her based on her own pre-existing issues, or her (apparently at the time) white BFF/crush is emotionally abusing her

#starbtag

so aubrey used to be a dirty cop who got a whole town killed while trying to rob them, the story does gymnastics to make this Heroic and Not Her Fault, becoming a cop was her heel face turn, and her Villain is a guy from her same marginalized group who went 'fuck you you're a fucking cop'

#starbtag #LLtag

man i wonder why it is that both cain and hayden as characters, out of the entire cast, managed to grab me by the throat the way they have. there's just something--

stops.

slowly turns to look at ivan and adam from LL.

SCREAMS.

#starbtag

lrp. caincore though 🥲

#starbtag

another for the endless mountain of large and small 'cain is a CSA survivor' red flags in this game, especially in the context of what we know lettie is like: his insistence that he doesn't want people to care about him because 'then they expect you to return the favor.' like MAN

#starbtag

not to age gap discourse or anything, but given the way this game treats sexual violence toward cain it's very jarring how they keep playing this tonally as homoerotic antagonism between two guys in the same age range/friend group, in the same breath as 'hayden knew him as a child btw'

#starbtag

i was trying SO hard not to make any 'stuck in a wall' jokes about hayden during this bit, and then they just casually hit me between the eyes with this

#starbtag

if i speak. 😔

#starbtag

and when i say 'half these men are fucking creeps' i mean that otis, hank, and jason in particular are all ✨️harmless pathetic imperfect but ultimately nice guys✨️ who you can probably throw a stone in a crowd of women and find at least one story of being traumatized by people like them lol

#starbtag

also FINALLY just clicked why he comes across as so eggy, and that is that for the vast majority of this game so far almost every male character in it is some combination of chill, ineffectual, (superficially) nonthreatening, and a noncombatant. even 50+ chapters in that's barely changed

#starbtag

me analyzing cain's gender presentation at any given time: little demon butch in drag, why are you crying?

#starbtag

i will say that it's made a massive fucking difference this time to have, like, video recordings uploaded by someone else that i can skip through and rewatch and take breaks from at any time, and don't have to feel responsible for archiving lest it be effectively lost media to me forever

#starbtag

also this is one moment picked out of many, many, *many* but i feel like it is actually a pretty pointed example of the specific kind of pro-self-harm vibe that permeates this game from the ground up and really puts me on edge. it reminds me way too much of what it felt to be a teenager

#starbtag

hey man can you turn literally even a single ounce of that obsessive need to self-deprecate about the mildest bit of cheese or whimsy or wordplay in your own writing, after explaining it to make sure the audience knows how clever and whimsical you are, toward like. being less racist

#starbtag

ah yes, Feminism: The Game, where the absolute sickest dunk we can come up with for the one-dimensional women we make up to seethe and rant obsessively about using our characters as mouthpieces is [checks clipboard] 'ugly'