The Many Drawings Of The Fillyjonk From Moominsummer Madness.

The many drawings of the Fillyjonk from Moominsummer Madness.

(She does not have a name, I tried to search for it but I couldn't find anything, but anyway, I think she's pretty).

I feel both of you totally, Freya, Fratley, the fall of Burmecia and Cleyra has a direct-line to my heart like absolutely nothing else and none of them get the screen time or acknowledgement in game to put my feelings to rest 🙏

I'm not done talking about Freya, actually.

Because ending the game with her reunited and back together with her long-lost lover makes sense, in a way: it's her goal, she's been searching for him, she's been longing for him since his disappearance. In a traditional story arc, she would indeed find Fratley again, stay with him in spite of the obstacles (such as, you know, amnesia), and consider herself content and happy.

But the thing is, the game doesn't really... give us an arc there. We see Fratley in Cleyra, he reveals he has no memory, he runs off once again - and then nothing, until the epilogue. Poor Freya gets nothing in terms of her own story arc and character development; it feels like all her pages in this book were torn out and we never got to read them. We were just handed the epilogue and assured it fit the rest of the story, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It isn't even necessarily that I don't think Freya should have gotten Fratley back. It definitely isn't that I believe his amnesia could or should have been magically cured somehow.

But goddamn do I feel like he should have re-entered the story at some point between Cleyra and the epilogue, even if only briefly - something to make that epilogue make sense, instead of feeling like a cheap nod to what Freya once said she wanted. Is it still what she wants? She never says so. She seldom ever mentions Fratley again after he nopes his way out of the story, and then only obliquely. He's not even the man she loves anymore; that man doesn't exist anymore, and she never gets the chance to properly mourn him. She just winds up in a relationship with the man who currently wears his face, hoping to find love there.

Freya Crescent deserved better.

It's been rattling around my head recently that Discworld is almost anti-whimsy, and I mean that in a good way.

Whimsy, as I define it, is when something magical is put in just to wow the reader. A magic thing that doesn't really effect the story, but its fantastical. Pots cleaning themselves? Moving paintings? A fantastical creature used as set dressing? A spell that does something cool but we'll never hear about it again? What do they mean? Why are they there? Doesn't matter, we're moving on.

But Discworld always applies Logic to these things.

e.g. The old idea of all dwarfs having beards? Ha ha, even the women have beards. How silly.

But that means all dwarfs are men. But there are female dwarfs, right? Are they happy being men? What if you gave one the chance not to be a man? Oh, sure, they'd still have the beard, the helmet, the axe, those are cultural, but what if a dwarf wanted to be a woman? How would other dwarfs react? Would there be biting insults? Snide remarks? Jealousy from other female dwarfs trapped in their society? What if the Low King were a woman? What then?

Pratchett always had this tenacity to follow a whimsical idea until it was ground down in its own grim reality. It's like those old conversations about what would really happen if Superman caught you falling from a high building. You'd smash on his arms because you're still hitting something indestructible at terminal velocity. But the comics would never show that.

Pratchett shows that.

Introduces a werewolf? She has a constant identity crisis and feels like a dog sometimes, between human and wolf, and she's discriminated against in places for being undead. A conman running a bank? Forces everyone to realise how useless gold really is in a scathing indictment of economics. Death becomes Santa? But WHY DOES THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL NEED TO DIE? WHY THE UNFAIRNESS IN THE WORLD? WHY?

What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the Reaper Man?

It's what sets these stories apart from so many others. Magic is never the solution, reality is usually the solution. And little is introduced without Pratchett delving the idea to its depths, sooner or later.

フラットレイ＆フライヤ by なー

Potentially the last day of testing for me with my game FriendShapes, then it's for testers to check a final time... it's been a whole lot of work, most of it wrestling with bloody RPG Maker MV and its occasionally severe limitations and ton of plugins used - but it's basically finished

Demo's been up for years and hasn't caught many people's attention, I'm hoping it being the full release will convince people to give it a ago - most people don't want to play a demo, they want the whole thing at once... either way, game'll be done and dusted 🤘

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"