Trabia Garden

I'm absolutely in awe of this collaborative fan animation for Omori, created to celebrate the upcoming fourth anniversary of the game's release.

I have no idea how the Omori fandom keeps making things like this! Just an incredible display of effort and skill and teamwork. It completely blew me away; I got very emotional the first time I watched it.

(NB: this fan animation contains full-game spoilers and Omori-typical unsettling imagery, and switches rapidly between shots on occasion.)

Just rewatched it and got chills all over again. Fandom is incredible. Nobody had to do this! And yet over fifty people came together to do it anyway, just for the love of it.

I'd love to create more fanworks for Omori, but it's a game I really struggle to write anything for. It lends itself more to fanart than to fanfiction, I think, and I'm not a fanartist; my visual art skills are limited to 'landscape painting' and 'poorly drawing Father Christmas hats onto characters' heads' (of which more shortly). I'm glad there are a lot of visual artists out there in this fandom, doing extremely cool things.


I can't think of anything else to include in this post, other than general crying about Omori, so I'll just do the traditional bad Christmas manip a few days early.


Merry Christmas, if you're celebrating! Best wishes from me and this extremely festive young man.

I was originally contemplating Andrew or Ashley Graves for this year's Christmas manip before settling on Omori, so I suppose it was never going to end up very festive (or very colourful). This is the problem with psychological horror games.

Yes, the problem with psychological horror games is specifically 'you'll end up using characters from them for your annual festive manip, thus ruining Christmas'. It's a long-established issue.

It's Christmas Eve, and, as is traditional, I've done a bad manip to celebrate the occasion!




It feels like I should have done a Christmas manip for Uncharted years ago. Elena is pondering whether Nate gets coal.

Merry Christmas, if you're celebrating it! I'm glad to know all of you. ♥!

Made an actual Silent Hill 2 edit of the Softer World strip I named my recent James/Mary fic after, because A Softer World and Silent Hill 2 are both totally timely and I know what year it is. I can't believe this strange, dark pairing still has so much power over my heart, all these years later.


The Final Fantasy VII Remake demo is now available on PS4! Just as a heads-up, it's about an hour long and you cannot save. Thoughts:

- Cloud is so pretty. Everyone is so pretty.

- You can't jump, alas! I keep accidentally opening the menu because I want to leap around pointlessly like you can in Final Fantasy XV.

- Cloud and Jessie have more chemistry than I'd expected. Huh. I loved them exchanging glances and shrugs while Barret lectured them in the elevator.

- I'll be very entertained if this remake not only reignites the ferocious Cloud/Tifa versus Cloud/Aerith shipwars but adds a Cloud/Jessie faction.

- I enjoyed Barret going 'okay, now prove you're one of us' and Cloud going 'uh, I'm... not?'

- Guard Scorpion struck me as an unreasonably tough, lengthy first boss fight. Nearly wiped out my supply of twenty-something potions. Maybe I just need to get a better grasp of the battle system? I think it's possible to switch difficulty levels mid-playthrough, so at least I'll be able to shift down if I continue to struggle in the full game.

- I really wanted them to have an 'attack while its tail is up' joke during that fight, but alas no.

- I don't remember any other voiced Final Fantasy in which the characters swear, and I am not yet used to it. At one point Cloud said 'no shit' and my reaction was very much 'gasp, he said a naughty word'.

- If you run into the security lasers five times, Jessie will stop expressing concern and start laughing at you. If you run into the lasers ten times, Jessie will ask, 'Um, do you have a fetish or something?'

- So far, it's looking promising!

It was this time last year that I disclosed I was struggling psychologically on here, and I'm pleased to report I'm doing much better now. I'm still not always on top form, but it's such an improvement compared to earlier in the year. I can enjoy things again! It's great! And now, if I find myself in that pit again, I know it's possible to climb out, even when it feels like it can't be done.

Anyway, it is photomanip time. I think this is the tenth year I've kept up this stupid Christmas Eve tradition.

I originally wanted to use Arthur Morgan for my annual bad Christmas manip, but I can't find a good shot of him as I like to play him (attractive stubble (length 2), short-to-medium hair (length 3 or 4), definitely no hat - he got his hat shot off in an early mission and I went 'he looks good without it, I'm sticking to this!'), and anything else doesn't look like Arthur Morgan to me!

So instead you're getting Miles Morales, who is appropriately capable of climbing up chimneys.




His spider-sense is telling him that you've been good this year and you should get lots of presents.

Merry Christmas, if you're celebrating!

Tradition demands that I post a stupid Christmas-themed manip on Christmas Eve, so here you go. Let's hope this works; I haven't used this image hoster before. (It was Imgur; I've now edited it to be hosted on my Dreamwidth!)




You're all shocked by the subject matter, I'm sure. I don't imagine Christmas exists on Eos, but I bet Prompto would get really excited about it if it did. I suspect he begged all the others until they finally agreed to put on those outfits.

(The reporter in Lestallum asked for photographs of imperial bases for an article, so off I trotted. When the time came to present them, Prompto handed him three photographs of imperial bases and one beautiful monochrome shot of Gladio's bottom. Nobody commented on this. I'm so confused.)

I posted an entry of tips for playing Final Fantasy XV a few days ago, and now I have one more to add. Once you've finished the game, you may want to reload your save and do some of the sidequests, dungeons etc. you missed. When you eventually feel you've done everything you're going to do and you want some closure, roll the credits from the title screen. These aren't the same as the credits that roll when you finish the game - they don't offer extra cutscenes or anything, but they have different visuals and music - and I think they're a really nice way of saying goodbye to this world.

It's entirely possible I'll be tempted back to attempt the last few dungeons, though. On the one hand, I'm concerned that they might get frustrating. On the other, Prompto complains the entire time when you're in a dungeon, and it is my favourite thing. I don't want to miss a second of it.

It's Christmas Eve, and that means it's time for the traditional stupid Christmas manip! I was wondering which character would be the subject this year, and then I discovered that Christmas Eve is actually a birthday in Dangan Ronpa. Could I resist? Of course I couldn't.




I couldn't just Christmas up one of Junko's magazine covers, so here's a picture of the unPhotoshopped birthday girl as well ('unPhotoshopped' meaning 'unPhotoshopped by magazine cover designers'; I cannot promise that this image is otherwise unaltered):




(Next Christmas, I'm probably going to go for a character with less inconvenient hair.)

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it!

Almost forgot about the terrible Christmas Eve manip tradition! We can't have that.




Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it! And, er, apologies to Squall, who I can't imagine is terribly happy with his new getup (or terribly impressed by the fact that Headmaster Cid has told him to deliver presents to everyone in Garden; this is not what he did all that combat training for).

I did manage to find a good picture of smug Joshua in the end, so I've now created two manips of Joshua Kiryu wearing a tiny skirt. I'm not proud. If my previous entry failed to meet your Joshua-in-a-tiny-skirt needs, though (or even if it succeeded; sorry!), here you go:




Here he is posing flirtatiously and looking immensely pleased with himself. As well he should, because not many people could wear that tiny skirt as well as he does.

One reaper in The World Ends With You tells you he'll only let you pass if 'pretty boy' ('You're speaking to me?' asks Joshua) comes back in head-to-toe Natural Puppy, a girls' clothing brand. If you do dress Joshua in Natural Puppy, the reaper will say, 'Wow... you actually kinda work that.' I can readily believe it. (And then he doesn't let you pass after all, because he doesn't have the authority to remove the wall. The game just wanted an excuse to make you dress Joshua in girls' clothes.)

The clothing system in The World Ends With You does create some odd mental images sometimes. In my game, Joshua ended up wearing a patchy biker jacket over a girl's school uniform and work boots. Shiki is wearing a full-body cat suit and a pirate hat. Beat is carrying a rubber duck.

I'm going back over the chapters at the moment, trying to get all the Secret Reports, and there are so many things I missed the first time around! All this optional dialogue! The main thing I've gathered from my further exploration is that Joshua flirts with Neku even more than I'd originally realised.

There was a wonderful moment when I was trying to work out the location of one of the hidden items: I stared and stared at the clue 'SHOWN A DREAM', becoming increasingly frustrated as I had no idea what it meant, and then gave up and exited the menu and realised I was standing directly in front of the gigantic SHADOW RAMEN sign.

Ahahaha, awww, if you buy enough at le Grand the shop assistant develops a massive crush on you. I was already fond of the le Grand assistant because he was one of the few shopkeepers who didn't obviously resent me when I hung around for a while and then left without making a purchase; I suppose that was because just seeing Neku was enough for him. The proprietor of Shadow Ramen, meanwhile, assumes that you have a crush on him and gets really nervous whenever you're around. I'm tempted to max out friendship with all the shop assistants now, just to see how what they say changes (and to stop them getting annoyed when I leave without buying anything; stop making me feel bad, fictional shop assistants! It's starting to make me feel awkward when I leave shops without buying anything in real life!), but that would cost me an awful lot of yen.

I sort of want to write The World Ends With You fanfiction, but I don't have any ideas! Where are you, inspiration?

Upupupu!




oh my God no this is the worst crossover ever what am I doing.

I received a request for a Pokémon manip post, and, hey, who am I to refuse? (I can't guarantee that I'll run off and make a Pokémon-related manip every time someone asks me to, but it's certainly not something that generally requires much prodding. I am weak-willed and very fond of Pokémon indeed.)

Pokémon in the Portal universe are probably kept in Aperture Science Pocket Monster Containment Spherical Cubes.




As always, this is an invitation to post your own silly Pokémon-related manips in the comments! Or indeed Portal-related manips; both are extremely manippable fandoms. Have fun!