leizi s1

Love that IS6 confirms that there are horses on Terra. They're called gallopbeasts and got used to pull chariots.

In other words, new Amiya Guard skin makes it plausible that she is a legit and regular horse girl. Cute!

Amiya is doing her best to put the knight in Arknights.

Amiya the overworked birthday girl!

Happy birthday Rhodes CEO!🎂🎉

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY ONE AND ONLY DAUGHTER WHO I LOVE SO MUCH

Raidian

Raidian was so ridiculously popular online (such that even artists that didn't play Arknights would make art of her) despite only being a bonus unit in one of their experimental event game modes that Hypergryph scrambled to make a permanent version playable as soon as possible that was also:

I KNOW HER

is6 launch moodboard but i only know what oomfs on discord have said about it

update from the is6 front lines:

also this chart i just threw together please let me know if i missed anyone

She could've given the water normally, but she decided not to.

I really admire the creativity from redjuice, Melanite's illustrator, for coming up with tail fishnets.

We talk about the boot pervert art director who makes sure things like these make it in game;

But I truly, deeply have to admire the depth of thought to figure out something that feels so intuitive in retrospect. 'If a character has a tail, what does that constitute in their fashion? Clothing cut outs for sure, but what if they want to dress up fancy? Hmm... what do people wear for more high class parties? Fishnets- what if- tail fishnets.'

To come to such a conclusion I believe it probably would have required a deep consideration and perhaps familiarity with the character, and a care and love for design and world building, all visible through only a small, mostly hidden detail.

My only regret is that there's no way to get a closer or clearer view.

I also appreciate Eunectes and Rose Salt who, similarly, have storage bands on their tails. The considerations that these artists give to their designs, and how these characters would behave, whether through outside input or entirely voluntarily, is thoroughly appreciated.

How could I be so stupid! I forgot Nueda!

I really admire the creativity from redjuice, Melanite's illustrator, for coming up with tail fishnets.

We talk about the boot pervert art director who makes sure things like these make it in game;

But I truly, deeply have to admire the depth of thought to figure out something that feels so intuitive in retrospect. 'If a character has a tail, what does that constitute in their fashion? Clothing cut outs for sure, but what if they want to dress up fancy? Hmm... what do people wear for more high class parties? Fishnets- what if- tail fishnets.'

To come to such a conclusion I believe it probably would have required a deep consideration and perhaps familiarity with the character, and a care and love for design and world building, all visible through only a small, mostly hidden detail.

My only regret is that there's no way to get a closer or clearer view.

I also appreciate Eunectes and Rose Salt who, similarly, have storage bands on their tails. The considerations that these artists give to their designs, and how these characters would behave, whether through outside input or entirely voluntarily, is thoroughly appreciated.

arknights has more successfully captured what "a playable servant" would feel like than any official type-moon game so far, is the thing

servants have quantifiable stats but while those do play Some role in servant vs servant combat they're basically irrelevant once the noble phantasms come into play, because servants by definition all have at least one super special trick that breaks the established rules for what is possible to happen. battles in fate are not about running the numbers they are about strategic use of your special bullshit trick and exploiting loopholes in the opponent's special bullshit trick. it's alllll about finding and creating the conditions under which your special trick can break the rules the most.

fgo does not do this. the vast majority of fgo servants don't have a special trick at all, they have buffs and debuffs and damage. very rarely they make something that manipulates the mechanics directly a little like BB summer card lock but categorically they make each kit by simply checking some boxes on the list of things that can happen in the game. the extella games gave every servant's noble phantasm and abilities the exact same effect of "damage" with only the animations being different. the extra games did put a lot of emphasis on information over raw numbers so they got closest to capturing the nature of servant vs servant combat imo but they still didn't really dabble into manipulating what is game-mechanically possible to happen. they stick to the rules. they preserve "balance'.

but servants are not balanced. servants are completely defined by the fact that they each have their own unique gamebreaking trick. just like 6* operators.

6* operators have quantifiable stats. they do this or that type of damage. they have this or that amount of offensive and defensive numbers. but more importantly, they also all do some bullshit that redefines what is or is not allowed to happen on the field. and the bosses all have their own special bullshit tricks that control what happens on the field, and you win by exploiting the loopholes in those tricks with your own tricks. and sometimes that trick is in fact just overwhelming firepower. THAT'S servant on servant combat.

I genuinely believe Federico is like 90% of the reason why the central themes of emotion, humanity vs seaborn, and human connection actually work, because it would be so easy to completely ruin the message by making it a vehicle for typical "love is what makes us humans" "if you don't feel love and emotion exactly like everyone else does you're not an ACTUAL human with a SOUL!" nonsense, like to the point I'm also anxious I might end up sounding like that every time I try analyzing the seaborn conflict in any way, but thanks to Fede being written the way he is while having such a central role in Zwillingsturme and being so close with and important to Arturia we know that when she says "it has to include everyone" and when the game falls on praising human qualities and the power of human connection they don't mean "everyone who can feel normal human emotion :)" "everyone but they're gonna need to become human" but simply everyone, no one left behind, no one erased. The focus on destroying the barriers between people exists as an answer to oppression and discrimination, to bring humanity together so they can work as a whole to face adversity, not because not feeling empathy the same way Arturia does is "wrong". Even during the piano scene when Fede is shown as unable to understand why music, why art move people the way it does, despite it being a focal point of everything about Arturia and everything about the humans who stand against the Seaborn, it's never presented as a failing on his part, never presented as him being fundamentally incompatible with humanity - in fact that scene is where he learns how to approach emotion from his own angle in his own way as a form of data and it's when he grows as a person and becomes able to use it to better get Arturia despite his difficulty in conveying and "feeling" emotion. He doesn't get Sankta empathy, he values logical understanding over emotional connection, he's joked about from other characters as being more like a robot than a human, he's deliberately written as being an opposite to Arturia's unrestrained empathy, and yet he is the protagonist to Arturia's antagonist role, he is the one who understood her the most and who could support her in the finale, he's the one outsider who cared the most about fixing things in the Monastery while the "proper" Sankta were all busy dealing with their own problems or actively worsening things (hi Oren). His character arc doesn't have anything to do with him starting to "get" emotions like "real people" do but just about starting to ask questions, to find a way forward when his strict adherence to logical reasoning fails him, to interpret why he does what he does and feel the way he does, to understand why things happens and why people act certain ways, and in quite a few scenes that's precisely why he could reach a conclusion others couldn't.

His biggest scene in Hortus involves him refusing to accept Clement's position that just because the only flower left from his garden he had a deep emotional attachment to was a bit damaged and not perfect the way he grew all the others to be, the way he wanted it to be, then its survival is meaningless.

Just because Clement couldn't see the worth in the flower's existence it doesn't mean there was none for anyone.

Just like Federico was the one chosen by the Law amidst countless "perfect" Sankta well accustomed to their supernatural Empathy.

Everyone means everyone.

I’m really glad Arknights didn’t just say “Oh Executor has emotions now” and leave it at that, because Federico has ALWAYS had emotions. He just expresses them in a different way than other people, and that’s okay.

Despite not “getting” Sankta empathy, Federico has always been shown to have empathy, even in his story debut in Operational Intelligence. From helping Vermeil to get her revenge to telling Clement that he doesn’t deserve to die, Federico has always been able to express that empathy, even if it might be in a different way than the “perfect” Sankta of Laterano, and I think that’s something very important.

The Laterano-related events have always had things like questioning oneself, understanding others, and broadening one’s own perspective as central themes, and Federico’s character development proves exactly why he was chosen to be their protagonist.

I want to call special attention to his debut, given that his most recent appearances have been thoroughly covered in this post: His debut with Vermeil is a perfect encapsulation of Federico as a whole:

The thing with Fede is that the text seldom says it out loud, rather, it shows the level of empathy Fede is willing to exercise time and again by simply having him logically rationalize that ‘empathy’, or rather, considering the wants of others besides him, is, in fact, the best possible way to go about most situations because he places importance in how others think. His logical empathy is the direct opposite of Sankta halo empathy, and that’s why it works, he had to bumble his way through a million interactions with a social handycap to the point that the well being of others isn’t just a contrivance, but an important aspect to the formulas of success. It’s why when halos shut down and now Sankta have to use big boy words to communicate, he is Simply Chilling, he already had to deal with that times ten from the start.

It’s great that you can go back to his very first scene and immediately see the foundation of what he’d become in the future.