(if you saw some of the things in this post before no you didn't)

(Crossposted to Tumblr)

Taion explicitly states he was "taught" how to use the Mondo by Nimue, but elsewhere else in the game, the type and power of a Blade is spoken about as if it's some inbuilt quality of the people of the kingdoms, and being able to change past a certain point it is remarkable to the point of being unheard-of.

Based on this, I think Taion’s “Blade” is just the gauntlet he uses to manage the Mondo at a large scale, similar to how Noah’s blade becomes a gauntlet when he has Lucky Seven drawn. Nimue, similarly, just has the gauntlet, possibly due to having been a non-combatant in the beginning. Katashiro/Mondo being shared knowledge between them marks them as something else than a Blade, possibly a technology/combat skill that is lost to the rest of Agnus while persisting in Nimue’s colony through tradition.

Furthermore, it’s entirely plausible that Katashiro were originally not a weapon at all, but rather a surveillance tool. Taion being able to slap a bitch halfway across Aionios with his could be simply him being a talented mage -- something that is fairly rare among Agnians, whose combat abilities are more melee-focused with the occasional purely-ranged gunner thrown in. We also see him use the Mondo for non-combat purposes like tracking, when we know Blades will dissipate if knocked out of their wielder’s hand for long enough.

Agnian Blades also generally have a wider variety in construction than Kevesi Blades, possibly due to differences in Kevesi and Agnian physiology. Kevesi need power frames for circulating ether in their bodies, and for properly powering their Blades -- but with a limited amount of engineers in the world, the majority of soldiers won’t be able to customise theirs, or keep it tuned to the changes in their Blade. Agnians, in contrast, have core crystals that handle the circulation of ether naturally, leaving more freedom for naturally-occurring changes in Blades based on the wielder’s strength and temperament.

Perhaps due to a quirk of fate, Taion just happens to have both the powers and the temperament to make him basically the ideal Katashiro user, to the point that his original Blade basically just serves as an interface to allow him broader and more complex control over the totality of the Mondo he can summon, which is why the Ouroboros powers latch onto them. It puts him in an interesting halfway-category between the fully melee frontliners and the fully ranged rearguard, as is befitting of his primary role as a tactician and a support mage.

My game is still with my friend. I need it for double-checking the stats, but....

Let's be clear, though. When it comes to actual combat ability, Taion can be kicked over like a pile of firewood with little effort by people below his weight class, and he's only saved from being as made-of-paper as Isurd by virtue of being healthy to the point of obsession and also not running on two cups of whatever-goes-for-coffee every eight hours. Also in terms of raw numbers, he's less powerful than Isurd, as we know from Tidal Wave being a strictly worse version of Soulfire.

Taion's specialisation into a combat swiss army knife is primarily a temperament-driven development. We see how keen and thoughtful he is in the beforetimes, taking a wide angle approach to strategy that people with more specialised skillsets consider either wasteful or cautious, but that makes perfect sense coming from a center guard who is both expected to back up the frontline and multiply their combat potential, but also reinforcing the rear, and being the last line of defense for the full support roles. It's not possible to separate out which came first, him specialising into a combat style that has a huge mental overhead, or his preference for field control and fighting at multiple ranges at the same time.

Furthermore, this final version of his fighting style we see is informed by Taion having nothing left at the start of the game outside of Mio and Sena. He is the off-seer's bodyguard -- in practical terms, he exists just to slice to ribbons and reduce to ash anyone who threatens his ward. However, since Mio can't not be throwing herself into combat with the whole of her being, he also needs to be able to keep up with her, and stop her from getting herself killed.

Ethically sourced gaslamp fantasy aesthetics

The Time Balance Department events in Cookie Run are definitely my favourites on purely aesthetic grounds.

The TBD's colours are white, yellow and orange! It's all gears and mechanisms and old incandescent light bulbs and CRTs and even vacuum tubes! It's all time-travel themed, so there's lots of clocks, arrows and hourglasses. It balances the coolness of metal with the warmness of incandescent and gaslamp light. I love warm retrofuturism.

I also like all of the musical themes, especially Timekeeper Cookie's theme. I love the bombastic supervillain cutscene rendition of it, I like the version that plays in "End of Time" that is like a sad lullaby, but I think that the lobby version that plays in "Timeless Ballroom" is my favourite -- it really lets the waltz of it all come through, it's very sweet and relaxing and it has a sort of relaxed stillness to it that really fits the lobby theme.

Also I think TBD event cookies are all bangers, and all have extremely cool outfits. Timekeeper Cookie (see the end of time, become nonbinary) has such a fun, manic design and I like how all their animations are a bit twitchy, it fits their chaotic nature really well. String Gummy Cookie is incredibly cool. Croissant Cookie is the Wrench Wench representation I love having in my media. (I also like how Baguette Cookie makes cuckoo clock noises XD the first time I heard it I lost my shit.)

Nobody here gets to the level of being my Absolute Fave, but they all dominate my top tens and fifteens easily. I think the art department, the composers and the game designers are all firing on all cylinders whenever it comes time to do a TBD event, it's great.