u/bmrtt

Art by the amazing Tlanzac

Overwatch dudes are suck genuine weirdos that you don't even need to be a womanizer to pull this off, literally just be able to hold a basic conversation and you're already ahead of like 90% of them

My goal is getting these girls somewhat interested in me, if it goes well in just a few days we'll be talking regularly on multiple platforms, ideally on any social media that isn't discord for personal involvement

Then I start by something small, like a minor embarrassing memory, but I slowly ramp it up the next few days to full on trauma dumping, I tell them the people I lost, my suicide attempts, the time I got abducted, stuff that you absolutely should not tell to people you've known for a few days

It gets awkward real quick and they try to change the subject or straight up leave me on delivered, but I do it again soon after, and so far I have a 100% block rate eventually, which is incredibly cathartic

I'm fully aware they don't care about me at all and are likely talking to a lot of other people but it doesn't matter in the slightest

Only did this a handful times so far and I'm already addicted to the high

It's the standard fare. I queue all roles (tank) on QP, I lock in one of the "good" tanks - which is usually Ramattra these days, and as I'm mindlessly scrolling away on my phone to stimulate my ruined brain, a support with a decidedly feminine name is pushing into me while spamming hello.

Mercy is no doubt the first option, but Juno and Kiriko is also possible.

An invite, no doubt, to a ritual of validation. She doesn't play this game to grind ranked or be an amazing player, she plays to be seen. DPS players are hit and miss, "selfish" tanks don't care about them and do their own thing, and they'll often be in a subconscious competition with the other support.

That leaves me. But who am I, exactly? Does she know my real name? Does she know of my dreams and aspirations? Does she know of my battles in my own mind? Does she keep a secret which I couldn't confide to anyone else? Or am I just a Ramattra, an empty and superficial shell, that she hopes will validate her?

I accept the invitation. We exchanges hellos, voicelines, emotes. I do the headpat thing that they love. She spams crouch in ecstasy, because she's seen. She's valid. Whatever trauma has led her to being a healslut in this dog gone game at 4 in the morning no longer exists in that moment.

She repays this by pocketing the hell out of me, even at the cost of letting others die. Now it's my turn to feel validated by having her give her unbridled attention to my survival. She believes she's important to me, and she makes sure it's mutual.

No matter the result, I see the endorsement at the end. If she's particularly social, she'll even say something like "wp ram!! :3" which she has already decided before we even left the spawn. The game or its result is entirely unimportant to her, so long as she occasionally gets the taxi, peel, or even a hello here and there.

And yet, it's superficial. During these minutes in which we mean the world to each other, we perform little more than a masked ball. I know what she wants me to do, and she knows hers. Maybe in another world, I actually could caress her head as she heals something in me. But in this one, we are locked behind screens, and neither side wants that to change.

Will we ever break free of this cycle? Do we even enjoy playing this game, or at least the heroes that we pick? Or is this the safest we get to exploring intimacy without the risks of actually being intimate? Is this actually helping with whatever led us to this moment, or are we just kicking the proverbial can further down the road?

All these questions fade as we stare at the home screen. Time to queue again.

Well played "kitten". You pulled off a nasty rez in Eichenwalde an hour or so ago, but I probably should've stopped drinking even before that if I'm writing all this right now.

Why are we still here? Just to suffer?

I’m genuinely blasting my shit smoove off

Also I just realized I wrote "so shattered" it's meant to be "solo shattered" but it's obvious already

Life these days feels like a wheel without any good rewards in it

Like even if you get lucky and work hard and win, it's just boring shit

I don't even play this fuckass game anymore I just hop in a solo custom game, run around the map for a bit, then quit

Many such cases

^(art by silveme)

I am so incredibly done with support players and their beginner level gaslighting in this game.

"Oh you were behind a wall"

"Oh you should get a health pack because I'm not actually a healer somehow"

"Oh a flanker looked in our direction so we had a meltdown and let you die"

"Oh you were overextending by not emoting with us on point"

You are useless.

You play the single easiest crutch role with a solution to any problem you might face, and you're so coddled by virtual gratitude that it's become a shell around your ego.

For reasons beyond my reckoning, I still play this cursed role in every game, and while it's always just as miserable, there once was a time when Overwatch supports were supports.

They followed you.

Somewhere along the years, the supports that followed you into death disappeared, slowly replaced by these egomaniacs who always know better, who are too important, too busy, too "friendly" and yet so superficial.

There is nothing that crushes your will to play like going against a tank who actually has healers care about him. Outplay as you might, you will still lose. A tank is only as good as he is enabled.

I'm tired.

Like think about it.

When was the last time you saw a post about Overwatch in a non-Overwatch circle and the game and the surrounding community wasn't heavily mocked in the comments?

At best there'll be comments about how the game was only good a long time ago, at worst people will talk about the whole sexual harassment meltdown at Blizzard and how players are weird for still supporting the company.

And yes, this is very much exclusive to Overwatch. It's basically Concord levels of clowning. Every game gets some flak, but OW basically never sees a positive comment in neutral circles.

And yet when you go to any OW community, it's business as usual. People not only have zero issues supporting Blizzard, but they actively want to. The Big Three of skin cashcows could fund a game each by themselves with how they're happily throwing money at pixels. It could be the blandest, most uninspired skin you'll ever see and they'll still lose their minds about wanting it.

It almost feels embarrassing to play the game in the big 26.

I always hated the term "AI slop" because it hasn't been accurate in a while now. AI tools of today can generate creative content without the trademark signs of being AI generated, which inspired the word "slop" in the first place. It's a losing battle to insist that AI is always low quality, because it simply isn't true.

However...

The real problem with AI is that it's simply too good. If you ask it to generate a picture of a burger, the meat will be perfectly evenly cooked, the greens will be crispy fresh with the right amount of water droplets, the bun will be perfectly smooth. In reality, there will be imperfections, slight burns, wrong cut greens, chunks of bun missing.

You won't consciously notice them, of course. But your brain processes all visual input, and you're trained your entire life to subconsciously pick up these imperfections, like a visual handshake in the background. That's why people describe AI content as "feeling off" without being able to describe it.

It's not that it's not realistic. It's that it's inhuman.

The exact same concept applies to AI r34 as well. Human artists draw/model/animate porn for the love of the game, even if they're getting paid in the process. No one enters the field without being passionate about it.

As a result, they will also have their particular kinks and fetishes. Some will be particular about armpits, some will be areola connoisseurs, some will enjoy toes. Usually you can tell the artist's specific area of interest by which part of the anatomy looks far more detailed than the rest.

This, my friends, is where AI also fails. AI is perfect. AI is uniform. AI has no preferences and tastes beyond whatever you manage to squeeze into your prompt. Even if you try to replicate the human likeness, AI simply has no passion to make its work more attractive to itself.

Not to mention the plethora of ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI to begin with.

The main thing that I disagree with most philosophers and their schools of thought is that they turn life into a mathematical zero sum game, where existence is something that needs to be explained and justified. Camus came close to just barely getting it, but struggle in itself isn't meaning, and its modern interpretation largely misunderstands what absurdism stands for.

Now you're probably thinking "oh they're just going to say they're horny for Vendetta and she's worth living for" and while that's not wrong, it's also a very disappointing simplification.

Lust is one thing, and while it's enough for some, it's also utterly superficial. It's a hormonal byproduct of your evolutionary drive to procreate. That's also why "post nut clarity" exists, once your judgment is no longer clouded by your primal instincts, you feel revolted by the lengths you've went to satisfy them.

My word of choice would be "fire". A fire to live, to act. Vendetta is the character with the most fire in her that I've personally seen. Her lore, her gameplay, her lines, even her gameplays are seething with that fire.

As I personally see it, nonchalance and apathy is a disease that ravages most of us younger people. It became cool to not care, about anything at all. This I believe is part of the reason why "latina women" were fetishized on the internet for their stereotyped aggressive possessiveness. People simply yearn for any kind of high energy in relationships.

To me, Vendetta embodies that fire. A woman who lives to the maximum. A woman on fire with a very clear goal, a drive, and a mindset to achieve it by any means necessary. Is she reckless? Absolutely, and all the better for it. The wrong action is better than inaction, always.

Her visual design further matches her personality. She doesn't bother with a lot of armor in battle. And her muscular build confirms her dedication to her life, ask any woman and they'll tell you how difficult it is for most women to build abs like her. Her hair further prioritizes functionality over unnecessary styling in a clean bun.

It makes me feel comforted to watch her, listen to her. It reminds me that, while she's obviously a fictional character, there are real Vendettas out there.

And through all the trials and tribulations of this strange world that we live in, some of us aren't afraid to look at it in the eye.