fun community building activity: we hold the ceo of mattel hostage until they bring back eah

"The Roaring Fraud/The Frauding Knight" is a term used for the eponymous Roaring Knight from Deltarune.

Despite being an incredibly difficult fight even by secret boss standards, the Roaring Knight has gained a reputation as a Memetic Loser in the fandom. This stems from the fact that it has to force a cutscene once its health gets low enough in order to win, which is fueled further by the interpretation that Kris in the ensuing cutscene bails out the Knight from being defeated too early. This, plus Susie's boasts as seen above, has led to it being characterized as a coward who isn't as powerful as they pretend to be, especially in comparison to Susie.

But are people and Susie right about them? Well, it's more complicated.

While it's pretty clear the Knight was kicking the Deltarune Trio badly, one has to remember that Susie was able to hold her own until the Knight used their cutscene-ending slash to incapacitate them. Plus, Kris is seemingly working with the Knight and holding back.

However, after the fight, it uses some rather shady, dirty tactics, and one could see them as cowardly moves:

When the Fun Gang confronts them at the end of Chapter 4, Susie believes that, since they were able to leave the Dark World from Chapter 3 and drag Undyne with them all the way to the Dark World in the Shelter, they must at the very least be a Lightner to be able to do so, and thus the source of their power must only exist in the Dark World. Cut them off from the Dark World, and they should become a powerless Lightner—and thus, by sealing the Dark Fountain first, they'd not only expose their identity but also take them down then and there. The Roaring Knight doesn't even give the group a chance to see if she's right, immediately summoning a Titan as a distraction and fleeing in the confusion.

If you aren't blown away by the Knight immediately, you can see several signs that Kris is sabotaging their team's efforts.

It's easy to miss, given that everyone's damage to the Knight is already reduced, but by default Kris' is lowered further by half. However, it will be doubled for each of Kris' teammates knocked out, thus making it higher than normal if Kris is the last one standing. Evidently, it's hard for Kris to hold back against someone who just viciously beat their closest friends.

When the Knight knocks out Susie or Ralsei, they get a special status preventing revival. Kris just goes into negative HP as usual, suggesting the Knight is holding back against them in turn.

The most blatant sign is only shown if the player somehow manages to get to the end of the Knight's battle without taking a single hit. Kris will cough while the Knight slowly tilts their head, as if giving them a signal that the SOUL is just too skilled to be defeated by attrition alone.

If you manage to get through their incredibly difficult boss fight without getting hit even once, the narration box will describe the Knight slowly tilting their head after Kris gives them a knowing cough—a seemingly wordless signal that they need to throw the fight now.

The Knight is seemingly untouchable and a Hopeless Boss Fight... but it is possible to survive and continue dealing damage until you get its HP below a certain threshold. While it's possible that it glitching out might've been an act to get Susie's guard down by pretending to lose, Susie did damage the Black Knife, showing that the Knight and its equipment can be damaged with enough effort.

This tendency extends into Chapter 4. When encountered in the Dark Sanctuary, they waste no time knocking Kris and Susie down into the depths of the Dark World, destroying the stairs from the atrium to the Fountain in the process. They reappear several times to rain down a Storm of Blades in an attempt to impede the heroes' progress. And when they're apparently cornered at the end of the Third Sanctuary, they dodge Susie's attacks with ease and create five Dark Fountains to summon a Titan.

However, "winning" the fight will show Susie and Ralsei being defeated in a single swoop while their guard is down, from an attack that doesn't even display visible damage. Likewise, their surprise attack against Tenna (which they evidently did bare-handedly, given the twin slicing attacks that tore off his arms) deals upwards of 5900 damage, further showcasing that the Knight didn't need to put 100% effort in against the heroes when fighting them.

"Winning" the battle with it in Chapter 3 by surviving its final attack does force the Knight on the defensive and to seemingly retreat. Then Susie and Ralsei are slashed from behind while their guard is down, and the Knight makes Kris kneel, effectively having the same result as losing the battle. On the bright side, you get a sick weapon and a Shadow Crystal to boot out of it.

All in all, once it fights us, the SOUL, and the Fun Gang afterward, it remains on the defensive, attacking from afar and never rematching us again—escaping during the confusion it causes—along with Kris deliberately stopping us. Plus, the fact that similar entities like Asriel can be defeated by us also plays a role in this idea.

Farbeit from me to question Ben 10K's wisdom in things superhero related but if you are gonna give your son the most powerful weapon in existence, what's the point in starting him off small with only a selection of 10 lower tier ones and no master control? If you're gonna be bringing him with you to fight supervillains anyway, surely you a) want him to be using forms strong enough to keep him safe, and b) don't want him to time out and revert to his squishy killable human form in the middle of a fight? Y'know, like what almost got him killed a hundred times as a kid? He's gonna feel real stupid if Kenny dies to some villain of the week and the last words out of his mouth are "boy I sure wish I could be Humungousaur right now."

man. remember when phil was chilling in techno's house and left the doors open so a creeper wandered in and exploded in his face like 15 minutes before lore was scheduled to start, so he and ranboo had to frantically reassemble the whole room including trying to piece together all the map fanart before techno got home. cannot believe we got an absolutely top tier character moment out of philza minecraft zoning out and forgetting to close the doors while he talked to chat. just absolutely impeccable.

the clip for those asking!

EDIT: And here’s an animatic of it too!

https://youtu.be/ukquxONMQeE

in honor of 2k notes on my silly reminscing, some additional details i remember:

This post has Technoblade in it

Thoughts and Prayers?

Charlie Kirk believed that he was rational in his assessment of gun violence in this country. So, in his honor, may we take a moment of rational thought concerning his death and the media coverage so far?

The public is being urged to show empathy for his loss, by framing Kirk's legacy as simple debate of differing views rather than the deliberate deconstruction of facts, ambivalence to gun violence, and the disdain for women's rights and every nonwhite person walking, that is his true legacy.

Thank goodness for social media receipts or we'd never have the real picture of who that 31-year-old husband and father of two truly was. The media's side-stepping of how detrimental his flawed views have been for the public discourse could be argued as being the opposite of what Kirk himself would have wanted. He was a straight shooter about his views, and what he engaged in wasn’t mere debate. He didn’t simply exchange opposing views with others; he insisted on a particular framing of “facts.” And that brings me to a rational depiction of how honest debate actually works.

When There’s an Agreed Foundation of Facts

Imagine two people sitting at a table with a peach in front of them. Both agree on the obvious: a peach has fuzzy skin, a sweet or tart pulp, and a pit inside. With this shared foundation, the discussion can focus on meaningful differences of interpretation:

The debate has structure. Each side is building on the same baseline understanding of what a peach is, so the disagreement is about taste, preference, or application. Even if they don’t convince each other, the exchange is productive, respectful, and tethered to reality.

When Someone Argues Against the Facts

Now imagine one person saying, “That’s not a peach. It doesn’t have skin, pulp, or a pit. It’s actually a tennis ball that the grocery store is tricking you into eating.”

At this point, the conversation can’t progress as a real debate. The first person is stuck restating basic facts: “No, I can peel the skin. I can bite into the pulp. Here’s the pit in my hand.” But the other refuses to acknowledge the obvious.

The disagreement is no longer about preference or interpretation. It’s about whether reality itself will be recognized. And without that recognition, debate becomes impossible.

The latter was Kirk's bread and butter. It's the bread and butter for so many conservatives, their pundits, and followers. This discourse has created the ever-widening chasm we see between both sides because it impedes the ability to come to solutions that we all can live with.

I rack my brain trying to place myself in their mind-space so that I can understand what makes the disingenuousness preferable to them rather than an agreed upon set of truths/facts. If you've ever been to the nation's capital and visited the monuments, you know that the truths/facts are written in stone all over that place. Everywhere! Yet, the conservative side refuses to acknowledge them. Why is that? I have my suspicions, but I prefer not to voice an assumption of ill-intent. It's not my nature.

In light of Charlie Kirk’s death by gun violence — the very outcome he once dismissed as “unfortunately worth it to keep the 2nd Amendment,” and despite his belief that “empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage” — the most fitting way to honor his legacy may be to do exactly what he would have done if the victims were schoolchildren, a democratic legislator, or a non-white fellow citizen: carry on with our day as if nothing had happened.

I'm having left-over spaghetti for dinner. How about you?

https://videopress.com/v/gxQoxiUf?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Before I go to have left-over spaghetti for dinner, I'll leave you with a poem called Power, by American Poet Adrienne Rich, that ends with:

How fitting for Kirk and how fitting for the course America is on.

Source: Thoughts and Prayers?

I love trolling in LN YouTube comment sections, unfortunately my fellow LN enjoyers fall for it every time.

[ID: A diagram from a textbook titled "The Basic Stages of Text Localization". An older Japanese man labeled "O.G. San" is shown next to text boxes to show different stages of the translation process.

The caption reads: :In this example, we see that a raw translation doesn't necessarily convey the intended meaning. Clarifying it restores the intended meaning, and adapting the clarified translation presents the content in a new way while maintaining the original intention. Each stage is useful in its own way, and they all work together to produce a basic localization." End ID]

pearl what does this mean. pearl. pearl what does this mean

Dumbest thing about Alien Force is when they briefly tried to retcon it so that there's actually totally no such thing as magic in the Ben 10 universe because that would just be so silly even though yes demonstrably there is. We have witches and wizards running about all over the place. Ben got into a fistfight with Ah Puch the ancient Mayan god at one point.

people who don't follow baseball are missing out they don't even know about the mariners etsy witch

Yeah

"New York Style" cat scratching towers. Never forget playtime

It's 9/11. Reblog for awareness