I quite liked the awkward flow in their conversation. Interested to see where this goes.

I mean it could be argued that by revealing this "scheme", the TL org can no longer be trusted with any public statements it's made. They seemed to portray themselves as taking the moral high ground but were actually straight up dishonest about their intentions. The hypocrisy is one things to consider, but I think the bigger issue that doesn't sit well with people has to do with integrity, and the question is if they're content with trying to fool their followers this way, couldn't and wouldn't they have misled and lied to these followers before? For how long? Were the management of this org morally bankrupt the whole time?

The same could be asked of the other orgs, but they didn't open themselves up to scrutiny the way TL did.

The notification didn't appear on my Lemmy app so I didn't see your reply! I would have gotten back to you a lot earlier had I seen this! Whoops.

No better time than now to dive into Bleach, with the new anime season currently airing. There's a lot to critique about the story and how frustrating the pacing and power scaling can get towards the end, but Kubo is unparalleled when it comes to style, whether it be in storytelling or in character designs. I think it's worth reading just to see illustrations of some the characters and their powers.

I'm not sure what your appetite for explicit material (violence, sexual content etc.) is like, but I'll throw out a couple of titles I think might interest you:

I can't resist recommending Spice and Wolf to anyone who mentions fantasy. Originally a light novel adapted into manga and anime form, this story set in medieval times follows the journey of a travelling merchant, Lawrence, and his encounter with a wolf deity, Holo, that takes the form of a girl. I admit that this series is first and foremost a romance, but I think the writer also does a great job immersing the reader into a world set in the middle ages but where folklore were real. It's also a story that revolves around macroeconomics, and manages to make the subject digestable and even appealing to understand. One of my favourite series.

Another one in the same vein is The Ancient Magus' Bride, this time with a little less focus on the romance and a little more on fantasy. Chise, a teenage girl with a strong affinity to magic that brings her nothing but exclusion and sadness, finds herself up for bid at an auction. There, she is bought at a high price by a sorcerer named Elias and is told she is to become his apprentice. And also his bride. It's a more Harry Potter-esque story especially towards the more recent arcs, but it goes HARD on the Celtic and Nordic folklore. I know barely anything about European cultures and beliefs, but I loved this series and every new chapter and creature it introduced for a long, long time. Not to mention the art is gorgeous.

I'll end with Made in Abyss. I don't know if you've heard about this series, but it's a controversial one for sure. The city of Orth surrounds a vast pit which has been aptly named the Abyss. The citizens of this city make a living as Cave Raiders - people that explore the Abyss and dig up valuable treasures and relics left over from ancient times. Riko, a young orphan girl who dreams of becoming a great Cave Raider, meets Reg, a mysterious boy who has no memories of his past but has some strange abilities. Together, they descend into the Abyss and adventure together, and find out just how cruel and unforgiving the Abyss truly is. There's no denying some of the author's decision to make the characters children is very questionable, and that it'd be strange to read this without feeling uncomfortable at times. That said, Made in Abyss is a modern day classic. The art is breathtaking. It is a masterclass in storytelling, and there's no other series quite like it being written right now. And it has been adapted into anime (which is debatably even better than the source material) so you've got options!

I apologize, I didn't mean to write an essay, but these are manga that I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing so I couldn't help but write in a little more detail. I hope these descriptions made you a little curious!

Edit: sorry, spoiler tags don't seem to be working!

It'd be a time sink for sure, but I think you can only fully appreciate the explosive rise in tension and the eventual resolution of both series after watching them in full.

For Liquid vs Talon, both teams could have taken g1, while Talon looked like the superior team in g2, and so g3 starts with everyone already quite on edge. Liquid seemed to struggle to stay ahead and at some point start slipping, and it eventually leads to the endgame situation and the hail Mary by Zai. It literally felt like the endgame scenario - where out of the millions of possibilities, and where all these specific events and conditions HAD to be fulfilled, both right and wrong, that we got this single final outcome - and it felt like Liquid, in one fell swoop, took their sealed fate by the throat, choke slammed into the ground and screamed "I DECIDE WHO WINS!" It's a historic dota moment with a great storyline to preface it.

For Spirit vs BB, we get a similar situation, and the atmosphere and emotion of the previous series is still palpable, so it just continues to build as Spirit seem to be on the back foot right from g1, looking like they were plain outdrafted by BB. Spirit hold, and hold, and hold, and with BB staring them down, 15k networth ahead, Spirit with Yatoro on Drow just straight up respond with a resounding NO. The game that BB should never have lost starts to slowly slip from their grasp in a fashion closely resembling Tundra's g3 loss to GG. Suddenly Spirit is on BB's high ground even with a networth disadvantage, and they all in on the T4 into throne push and pull of some impossible magic to win the game.

You'd think BB, with their history of tilt, would be completed out of it after the loss, but they have grown immensely since which is why I think they've garnered so much favor. They show a lot more psychological resilience, and it looks like the first game never even happened in g2 as they outplay and crush Spirit quite convincingly, even if Spirit did try to push the game to its limits.

Which leads into g3, where Spirit start on the back foot from the very beginning and they never gain the advantage for a single moment, just desperately struggling to stay barely afloat. Pure and GPK look like MONSTERS for a good portion of the game. The tension only continues to build for the entire hour, and there are so many moments of brilliance and sheer skill that you'll never see even in regular pro matches - just something about the stakes of this last game that pushed every player in both these teams to play at a skill ceiling we might possibly never witness again (and you KNOW both teams are 100% invested in winning because the ridiculous amounts of pings by both sides). It leads to a base defense that turns into an all in down mid to throne by Spirit that I just don't have the words to describe.

Both series get some incredible and well-deserved casting from Sunsfan and Khezu. The only thing I could have asked for was a proper crowd to react to this, or maybe for me to have witnessed these series in the flesh. If we get moments like these in Seattle, we might just bring the newly renovated stadium down!

So yes, you'll see a lot of gushing about this day being one of the best days in competitive dota history, and no doubt about it that it was. And yes, if you call yourself a fan of dota, you'd out to witness these historic moments for yourself. It's worth it.

I see. Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, it doesn't make it any easier to read, but points for the effort to the creator, I guess.

Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, it got frustrating at times watching Nakano and Toda fumble and agonize over a couple of silly things, but things worked out, and more importantly - Mana-chan! What a turnaround from what she was at the beginning! Hands down one of my favorite characters.

So adorable, these two.

Have you read Mousou Telepathy by any chance?

Agreed on your second point - how did these things happen in an international tournament involving large amounts of prize money in the first place? And was this something that other TOs had successfully prevented, that the current one dropped the ball on? Or was this always a security and integrity lapse that existed and that we've only just spotted, which would imply the possibility of this happening in previous tournaments or even the DPC without being detected? They can't ALL be THAT incompetent, right...?

About the penalty that BB received, I'd be fine with it if it didn't seem like it was pulled out from thin air, but it does so it irks me a little. Again, just a lack of prep that makes the officials look incompetent, and really doesn't inspire confidence in the state of future tournaments.

Personally, I think the response by many spectators have has been unnecessarily toxic and double-standard at best, and inflammatory, discriminatory and intentionally career-ending at worst.

No doubt what he did was astoundingly silly, but until it has been proven that he was intentionally using another stream to cheat during that g2, branding him a cheater is just not right.

What makes this worse is that people are conflating his previous action with his Z drawing with this, as if this makes him more guilty of cheating, or that it's alright for everyone to rag on him now, even if this time around it may just be an honest mistake.

We know that there are consequences in leaping to conclusions without verified information, from the situation with Taiga to the mess with the T2 NA DPC. I think the state of professional dota only stands to lose if the spectators don't stop this mindset of vigilante justice and crucifying dota figures before they even get a chance to prove themselves innocent.

I wonder if the response to this by the dota audience (and maybe even the players on Azure Ray) would be any different if this incident had happened to anyone other than Pure.

Shout-out to my American EMS brothers and sisters! May the patients you pick up have relatively manageable mangled limbs!

As the saying goes - "Find a job doing something you love, and you'll only have to work for most of your life earning slightly more than minimum wage!"