Girls will literally look on silently in a mix of terror and amazement as dark, squishy paw pads blossom from their shortening, fattening fingers

googles “how to become the cool dogs from Cassette Beasts”

“Just use the cassette player” but that’s a poof tf :c

… is that they’re all just the fucking Stryfe.

I’m exaggerating a bit, but uh, let me explain. The Stryfe is a blaster that came out in 2013 under the Nerf Elite series. It’s magazine-fed, and a “semi-automatic flywheeler”, which means that it’s an electronic blaster where you hold down a “rev trigger” to make the “flywheels” start spinning quickly, and then every time you pull the trigger, one dart is fed onto the flywheels, which launch the dart due to their fast spinning. In other words, you rev up the blaster, and then one trigger pull equals one dart.

The Stryfe is one of the most iconic blasters in the entire hobby due to its overall solid design, performance, and high potential for modding. And to be honest, I absolutely think it deserves it. I own a Stryfe myself, and it’s a good blaster.

Here’s the problem, though. There aren’t really very many ways to do flywheel blasters. With springers you can do all kinds of crazy priming mechanisms but with flywheels you’ve just got… well, it needs a rev trigger, and that’s, uh, that’s it. Flywheel blasters are (apparently) crazy meta in actual blaster tag scenarios so a lot of people use them, but the variety between the various flywheeler options is just extremely lacking in my opinion.

It doesn’t help when my own personal preference leans heavily (read: entirely) towards mechanically interesting/unique blasters that are fun to operate without necessarily being battle-effective. Flywheels are neat and all but once you have one you’ve kinda seen em all… and you just keep seeing them… and seeing them…

So, to visualize these frustrations, I’ve compiled a number of YouTube videos where their titles or thumbnails mention the Stryfe (or how we’ve finally replaced the Stryfe or whatever the fuck) when the video is about a blaster that is not, in fact, the Stryfe. I have more than I included in the collage but I think you get the point. They’re just the Stryfe.

Buy a Villainator.

“Idk who this ‘Stryfe’ guy is or what they did, but damn, everyone seems to want them dead”

Magic users out here sharing those “steal their look” images but instead of listing the needed props and their prices they just use different images of potions

Or, even better, list the necessary ingredients and their prices

OR, even MORE better, not even different images of potions, just the same really shitty piece of clipart