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astradcreations · 18 days ago

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Reworking and improving my work

As agreed with lecturers they decided I can do a rework of my project due to my health issues.

Reviewing and look at previous works feedback :

The artefact shows some potential, but it ultimately falls short in delivering a cohesive and complete look of the universe of “Matsuyama: Curse of The Mirror”. The document feels very rushed, and it’s quite a short concept artbook for a final major project at MA level. The pages do show some care in the general branding, but it doesn’t have a cover and the level of polishing of the artwork varies quite a lot from picture to picture. There are some strong elements in both the document design and the work showcased in it, I like how each page seems to have a different branding based on the “universe” the assets are from, but only the branches and the waves of the page design are fully polished, and the page branding of the universe of fire and pg 4 do not seem to be cohesive with the rest of the document design. Most of the assets presented in the document are severely under-developed: pages 2 and 4 feel both very rushed and all the assets in these pages are not polished enough to be considered ready for publication, especially when assets like the “Fire Priest” and the “Fire Temple” Environment are developed to a much higher standard.

Well done in the details of the “Fire Priest” ribcage being almost a furnace of light, it adds such a strong level of contrast and storytelling to the characters. This is the level of polishing the other environment and characters should be at.

The dragon Ghost feels too rushed. The illustration feels very flat, Aya is very hard to spot in the composition, and while the design of the dragon shows a strong silhouette and pose, it needs more work to be developed fully, both as a character concept art and as an environment work. Those sketches in the bottom right corner do not add much to the page.

The main Character Aya does show some promising design choices. It would have been great to see another drawing or two about how she uses the weapons she finds and other variations on her appearance.

The Samurai Soul has an interesting concept, and you describe quite a lot of cool game mechanics, but where are the visual elements of these mechanics? While the design is developed to some extent, this character needs more work to give a proper idea of how big, strong, and powerful they can be. The final character artwork feels too rushed but does show an interesting silhouette that works well with the general concept. Consider developing other drawings and quick sketches alongside your main illustrations, this will give you chances of developing characters move-sets or alternative poses.

The environment of the Ghost City feels too rushed. While the mood is well suggested, this piece of environment art needs much more work to be able to suggest what textures, materials, assets and elements this universe is made of. In your blog you showcased some 3D models for this city, it could have helped taking a few elements from that render and add them to the houses walls.

The “Mother Spirit” monster form is very strong: the silhouette with these branches being part of the hair really creates a monstrous visage worth any Japanese Horror movies, well done. It also works well with the illustration of Aya being dragged into the mirror, with a few elements clearly “mirroring” the design of the monster. The human form is polished, but very generic and doesn’t seem to tell us much about the mother in his life. She looks too much like Aya (also sharing a similar colour scheme and clothing!) and this can be confusing for storytelling purposes, and, most importantly, it doesn’t create a brand new character to learn about. The mother would need a complete different set of clothing (maybe a more regal and “high-class”?), different silhouette, style and face to achieve that.

In conclusion, the artefact itself only has a few character design elements that feel completely finished and polished, being the fire spirit, the fire temple environment, and the monster form of the Mother. A few elements of the main character Aya are also coming through, but only marginally. The rest of the work is unfortunately not polished enough and feels incomplete in some parts. Those early black and white sketches are not worth showing at this stage (you showed these at your pre-production stage), you could have instead show more variations for the main character and a few experimental sketches you did of the creatures you developed. You clearly showed some strong improvement in your work and techniques, but you need to work on your time management and make sure to be able to deliver the same level of polish and finishing on all the art assets to the same level.

Promo Video

The promo video is more of a slideshow of your images than a promotional video of the project and, most importantly, of you as an artist. There are no links to your socials and, while it gives some idea of what the project is, it ultimately does not help the audience in getting to see the artist and the work you have put behind this. Most of the elements requested by the brief for your promotional video are not being met here. Some images are presented with some strong backgrounds, and this makes the video interesting to some extent, but it needs to be developed further to promote you and your project much more in depth.

Blog

Blog shows some insightful analysis of your process and you are clearly looking into topics that are relevant to the forefront of your field. The forefront posts are rather short though, and while they give some insight into the current state of the industry, it would have been nice to see more connection to how these could have influenced your own practice. The brief asks to research ‘why the people, ideas and artefacts you have identified are at the forefront or cutting edge and how the work you are doing relates to them”: this last part need a bit more of care, and it would have been a great addition to some of your forefront posts. Please also label your “Forefront” posts clearly in the future so that they are easier to identify from the more direct research posts done for your artefact.

Presentation

The presentation was a deep dive into your own artefact, which should have been only a part of the whole process, and you went a bit too much into the details of the project. The brief required you to also deliver an academic evaluation of your artefact and discussion about how your project would have been disseminated to reach your target audience. It would have been better to create a separate set of slides to discuss these elements instead of using the actual artefact. When prompted at the end you gave some strong insight about the skills you developed and how the project helped you in reaching those goals; these answers should have had some dedicated slides to support your major study project.

General

Some of the ideas behind the characters of “Matsuyama: Curse of The Mirror” are extremely original and proposing some impressive examples of character design, but only a few of the elements are properly polished to a level which can be considered fully finished. The majority of the art assets (characters, props and environment) ultimately feel rushed or incomplete and this unfortunately impacted the quality of your submission. The blog and the presentation felt rushed in a similar way, and it feel like your time management skills were tested in different ways throughout the final semester, and this clearly had an impact on the quality of your finished artwork. The finished artworks (especially your characters) show a different and stronger artist from the one that started back in September 2022, but you need to work on your consistency: you have developed a strong methodology of blocking out a 3D model, enhance it with photo-bashing and use a variety of paint-over techniques. Keep that up! If you try and use this method on all your artworks and give yourself proper deadline to complete each of the phases by (for example, half a day of sketching, 1 day for blocking out 3D models, 1 day for photobashing, etc..), you will be able to plan accordingly and deliver all of your work to the same level of your “Fire Priest”, which is by far the most impressive artwork of your submission.

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joeabdelsater3 · 8 months ago

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Defining the Forefront 1

youtube

In this first blog post of this type, I will explore the world of stylised game environments as an introduction to the work that I will be taking on later in the semester. Through the video uploaded by Stylized Station on YouTube, Melissa Perl explains the process behind the watermill scene that she created. So, by writing this post, I aim to break down her approach, main tools, and techniques which will inspire me to choose the appropriate methods that I will use to work on my personal project.

Her process begins with initial planning and conceptualization with a flexible vision. While she had a clear idea in mind, she chose to take an experimental approach, something I chose to do as well. After finding her main inspiration pieces, Melissa started with creating 3D blockouts to visualize the general shapes of the objects in her environment before she even had a concept illustration. Only then did she paint over these blockouts to refine her idea and create the concept art piece. Although I find this approach quite unusual, it proved that the order of steps to be taken while working on a project does not matter as much as the outcome does.

This personalised technique allowed her to identify necessary textures and model pieces, reducing the modeling workload by reusing and texturing elements strategically. This was done by colour-coding the separate parts of the main structure and determining their material classifications. The iterative method she took can also be seen at multiple stages like when she changed the camera angles and what shows in the background and the main structure's surroundings. She also shifts from the initial concept drawing as she works on the scene and does mini adjustments.

Very early on, she chose to create shaders and materials in Substance Designer, with flexible tiling and resizing parameters without affecting UVs and without causing them to stretch. I found this rather interesting as this is often unheard of in the games industry. Modelling usually comes first in line in a workflow for game asset creation, but her way seemed to work pretty well nonetheless. This underlines the idea that pipelines don't necessarily have to be strict and rigid, but can be adjusted dynamically to each artist's needs.

Her description of material creation in Substance Designer sure is very helpful for me if I choose to make stylised materials like hers, but what was even more insightful is the way she used the height maps in Unreal Engine. It introduced me to parallax occlusion mapping, which although has higher performance demands, significantly enhances the realism of textures that might appear flat when rendered outside of Substance Designer. Parallax occlusion simulates depth by layering multiple iterations of the texture according to the height map while avoiding changes to the model's geometry or the need for vertex deformation. She mainly used it to create 3D ground textures that can often make the scene look flat when looked at from the side.

One last thing that particularly caught my attention is her choice of lighting style which is a critical component in stylized environments. Melissa uses an artistic approach rather than a realistic one, contrary to common practice. She places blue and yellow lights to enhance shadows and highlights instead of focusing on using real-life references which helps transform the environment and give it a nicer artistic touch. However, one place where she did resort to realism is in her use of post-process volumes and exponential height fog in order to create atmospheric depth and ensure distant objects fade out appropriately to mimic natural vision.

Reference:

Stylized Station. (2022). How I Created this Game Environment in UNREAL ENGINE - Environment Art Breakdown. YouTube [online video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/SonheTAwcUI.

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charleskenny · 4 years ago

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Earwig and the Witch Review

Controversy, confusion, bemusement. Which word describes the latest film from Studio Ghilbi? Earwig and the Witch marks a bold departure for the Japanese studio that’s ruffled a few feathers but is actually quite a sweet film.

NOTE: This is a review for the forthcoming Blu-Ray/DVD combo release from GKIDS and Shout! Factory and not the film as shown on HBO Max.

Necessary Context

Before we begin, I have to state that I actually like Goro Miyazaki’s previous films including Tales from Earthsea. I find he’s a perfectly competent director who’s suffered from a series of unfortunate circumstances least of which is being the son of perhaps one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

Earwig is the first real attempt to depart from Ghibli’s hand-drawn style and it’s essential to approach it as such. Plenty of reviews bemoan that it fails to live up to Ghibli’s best, but that is an improper viewpoint to take because the film purposefully avoids such comparisons.

Goro (and his producers) are not oblivious to the economics of animated filmmaking and are well aware that CGI presents numerous advantages over traditional animation. Earwig is the studio’s first full-length CGI feature and they should be given some slack for at least trying.

Earwig and the Witch

Earwig and the Witch is based on the Diana Wynne Jones novella of the same name and is a natural fit for a studio that has both a feature with a young witch protagonist, and an adaptation of another of Wynne Jone’s novels under its belt. The film centres on an orphan called Earwig but endowed with the name ‘Erica’ by the orphanage matron.

Growing up in an orphanage in the British countryside, Earwig has no idea that her mother had magical powers. Her life changes dramatically when a strange couple takes her in, and she is forced to live with a selfish witch. As the headstrong young girl sets out to uncover the secrets of her new guardians, she discovers a world of spells and potions, and a mysterious song that may be the key to finding the family she has always wanted.

As I said above, you have to approach this film as a clean slate or you will be disappointed. The crew strike out on a different path from previous Ghibli films and tell a pretty straightforward story in a straightforward manner. There aren’t many higher themes or deeper meanings but that isn’t to say that there aren’t any takeaways either.

The Animation

The animation has come in for a lot of criticism that is, in my opinion, unwarranted and unfair. It is not Pixar quality, but then this isn’t a Pixar film and it wasn’t made with Pixar’s crews who have hundreds of years of experience between them, or Pixar’s hundreds of millions of dollars either. Indeed, the ‘Making of’ featurette shows a rather young but dedicated crew working with off the shelf software. When you see past the rough edges, the animation is actually quite well done. If you like silly faces you’re in for a treat. It’s perhaps a conscious decision to make the characters less detailed lest some uncanny valley creep in. Adults may notice this, but kids won’t bat an eye. If you can focus on what the characters are doing as opposed to how they’re doing it, you’ll be rewarded.

Backgrounds and props show a true attention to detail. The English countryside is rendered with an incredible accuracy that does match Pixar. The house itself (and the Mandrake’s rooms in particular) showcase a real flair befitting (spoiler) his musical tastes.

The Unusual Music

The music is, for want of a better word, perfect. Far from a classical film score, this is much more upbeat and contemporary. The original progressive rock songs (another departure for Ghibli) also add an ethereal feel to the film and are used at just the right points and add a layer of depth in conjunction with some character development.

The Quirky Characters

The characters themselves are an interesting bunch. Earwig is perhaps the most clear cut as a young, precocious girl who’s used to getting her way and is thrust into a situation where she does not. The Mandrake and Bella on the other hand, are far murkier and it is with the former that we see a lot of development over the course of the film. Thomas the cat is frustratingly plain. His role isn’t major and he serves as catalyst but not much else.

While the lack of development on Earwig’s part doesn’t jive with contemporary western thinking, both the director and Ghibli producer Suzuki Toshio state that they wanted to make her a character that kids could relate to. Indeed, the tagline for the Japanese poster above states that she "will not be put under anyone’s thumb". With this in mind, Earwig’s character makes a bit more sense and seeing her twist the adults around her little finger has to be satisfying for kids who, generally, have to abide by grown-up’s wishes.

The Story

The story is straightforward but, and it’s a big but, the final act is incredibly rushed. In the course of watching the film, I sensed the final act approaching and paused to see exactly how much time was left only to discover it was less than five minutes. So shocked was I that I had to double check to make sure my stream wasn’t broken but no, that’s all that was left. This exceedingly rushed climax and the loose ends left unresolved would be more frustrating if it also weren’t the case with the book the film is based on. Reading reviews for it reveal identical confusion with a rushed ending and loose ends that suggest another half of the story that doesn’t exist.

In this sense, the filmmakers were a bit too faithful to the source material and another half hour could have filled in a lot of gaps; especially since the big reveal is very exciting altogether. Except it doesn’t and any adult members of the audience will be left with questions answered but answers questioned. Kids on the other hand, should love that everything appears to work out for Earwig in the end.

Extras

The Blu-Ray/DVD release comes with a few extras such as the aforementioned ‘Making of’ featurette, full-length storyboards, and an interview with the Japanese voice cast. I found the ‘Making of’ in particular helped fill in a lot of hitherto unknown details about the film which really helped me see the film in the same light as the filmmakers.

Conclusion

Overall, I liked Earwig and The Witch. There’s a simplistic honesty to it of the kind that you don’t see in western films anymore for better or worse. It’s genuinely made for the kids in the audience which some may see as a detriment but is, in fact, a Studio Ghibli hallmark that Hayao Miyazaki has stated time and time again.

The film is a brave step into the unknown and what happens next is very much up for debate, but Earwig is a film that is worth seeking out and watching more than once.

The Blu-Ray/DVD combo (and regular DVD) is released by GKIDS and Shout! Factory and comes out this April 6th.

Originally published at https://animationanomaly.com/2021/02/24/earwig-and-the-witch-review/

#Diana Wynne Jones #Earwig and the Witch #GKids #Goro Miyazaki #Review #Shout Factory #Studio Ghibli #Tales From Earthsea #Toshio Suzuki

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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Little Women Remixed: So Many Beginnings & the Potential of Adaptation

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Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical 19th century novel about four sisters growing up in Civil War-era New England has become one of the most-adapted American classics. But few retellings have done as much with the potential of adaptation as Bethany C. Morrow’s. In novel So Many Beginnings, out on September 7th, Morrow answers a question many readers have had over the years: What if Little Women was written from the African American perspective? The answer is a rich narrative of growing up in challenging times with the promise of a better future ahead that still speaks to what generations of readers loved about the original story.

Although adults will pick up the story for comparisons’ sake, Morrow focuses her attention on today’s young adults who may not have read Alcott’s novel. She also is aware of younger Black readers who may have been exposed to the original story but could not relate to it because Alcott’s perspective is overwhelmingly white.

The central focus of the story is still the lives of Joanna “Jo,” “Meg,” and Bethlehem “Beth” with their adopted sister Amethyst “Amy” March as they navigate through young adulthood in 1863. However, Morrow’s narrative goes beyond replicating Alcott’s Massachusetts setting with an all-Black cast. The March sisters instead live on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina in the Freedpeople’s Colony. This frames their worldview as the opposite of Alcott’s, serving to interrogate her on-the-page biases in the process. In Little Women, the Civil War is a distant event that takes the March sisters’ father away from home. In So Many Beginnings, the stakes of the Civil War are far higher, as Morrow’s worldbuilding sets aside a literal translation of Little Women’s plotline and lets the history of these colonies set the course of the story.

Alcott March (an Easter egg!) has left his wife and children to fight the white slaveholders. Soldiers and civilian refugees in town are a constant reminder of the realities of war. The March family have emancipated themselves from slavery and see that the Union losing would mean a loss of freedom. Jo writes a current events newsletter. Meg teaches the colony’s children their first formal lessons in a classroom while wishing for a future husband. Beth is a seamstress in high demand. Amy’s artistic drive is channeled towards dance.

Although the changes Morrow has made will not please canon purists, they are wholly necessary to portray the African American perspective during this era. Jo adapts selective mutism as a defense mechanism because she cannot trust white people after what she has gone through. In addition, her writing is geared towards gaining white benefactors for the colony who will supply money and materials the Union Army refuses to provide. Meg sees that white people in the colony who are abolitionists and missionary volunteers are not active antiracists. She teaches in a tent while the white teachers teach indoors, and gets last picks on supplies. Marmee, now Mammy, fears that white men will still find a new way to undermine Black families. Beth’s chronic illness is seen as “attention-seeking” and “laziness” by white doctors and not something that needs reasonable accommodations.

Some Black reviewers in advance of the 2019 film adaptation of Little Women directed by Greta Gerwig were hoping for Hamilton-style colorblind/color-conscious casting. However, these hopes were inevitably dashed by an all-white cast. The PBS/BBC miniseries from 2018 should have elicited the same reaction, but it is likely that poor advertising prevented more critiques along this vein. Even my own review of the miniseries briefly mentions intersectional perspectives. Morrow’s remix of the classic is designed to address the lack of diversity in a more emotionally satisfying way.

Books

A Song Below Water: A Story of Sirens & Black Girls Coming Into Power

By Nicole Hill

Books

From Bridgerton to Sanditon—Putting Island Queen in a Period Drama Context

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

Marriage, (or the avoidance of it) depending on the sister, remains a central theme in So Many Beginnings, but the story’s new context carries a separate meaning from the original novel. Enslaved people were not allowed to legally marry, and slaveowners sold families apart. While marriage is seen as an aspirational goal, work outside of the home to support the household is seen as necessary for survival. Many in the colony worked for the Union Army for wages, but rent and clothing were deducted from whatever was promised. This places Jo’s resistance to developing romantic feelings for Loren “Lorie” in a light that the classic dynamic of Jo and Laurie does not have. Jo values his company as a friend, but a romantic relationship would leave no one Black to advocate for the colony’s survival. Meg, on the other hand, is very eager to start a family, and actively seeks courtships. Beth and Amy see marriage as a less urgent future event.

On the outset, the story premise does not seem poised to promise anything other than pain and strife, but Morrow packs in many moments of joy for the March sisters in between the struggles. They attend parties, read books for pleasure, and do other normal teenage girl activities. Adult readers looking for exact analogs of classic moments from Alcott’s story, such as the play, are going to be disappointed. However, readers who want to see much more Black joy in historical fiction will be richly rewarded. The realities of the colony erase the predictability for adult readers but, in return, readers develop a relationship with Morrow’s characters that is entirely different than the original story. Both teens and adult readers alike will find that the end of the journey for the March sisters brings a whole new perspective of what freedom actually meant for emancipated slaves.

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So Many Beginnings brilliantly combines the escapism and relatability of a YA coming-of-age novel with the necessary work of reclaiming narratives and perspectives previously erased from the American literary canon. In fact, it is safe to say adapting the novel for the screen would do a better job of advancing diverse representation in period drama than a race-blind adaptation of Little Women ever could.

So Many Beginnings hits bookshelves on September 7th.

The post Little Women Remixed: So Many Beginnings & the Potential of Adaptation appeared first on Den of Geek.

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thebandcampdiaries · 4 years ago

Audio

Ember Mikayla - Dissociative Anarchist EP

A punk-rock EP with a timeless, yet catchy sound.

January 2021 - Ember Mikayla is a solo artist and songwriter with a focus on making music that blurs the lines between various genres, including alternative music and punk rock. Recently, she set out to release a brand new EP titled “Dissociative Anarchist.” This release feels like a perfect example of the artist’s approach to creativity and songwriting, going for a direct and one-of-a-kind sound. The release unfolds through four tracks, each setting the bar higher in terms of innovation, and stretching the artist’s sound towards different creative directions and songwriting nuances.

The opening track is titled “Anarchist Skirt.” What makes this song special is that it feels like an immediate introduction to the group’s unadulterated energy. The arrangement has a really direct sound that makes me think of some early Foo Fighters music, especially when it comes to the wall of sound brought on by the guitars. The vocals are hard-hitting and inspiring, at times even reminiscent of iconic vocalists such as Kurt Cobain or the early days of Greg Graffin from Bad Religion, only to mention a few. Having said that, Ember has a unique voice and a distinctive character, which really makes the music all the more personable and direct. The second song “Untouchables” has a really different vibe. It is a lot more melodic and catchy when compared to the angsty vibes of the first single. This track actually makes me think of some of the earlier Blink-182 music (Think Cheshire Cat) as well as iconic bands such as Screeching Weasel, The Queers or Mr. T. Experience, only to mention but a few. It’s all about capturing that unique melodic feel that is at the heart of a great punk band!

This release is a perfect example of the artist’s unique attitude and charismatic approach to songwriting and performance, going for an immediate and earthy sound that favours the human connection between the musicians, rather than hiding their work under an excessive layer of studio trickery.

The third track on this EP, “Dissociative Anarchy” is a fantastic track, and perhaps one of the most unique songs on this release. The tune has influences ranging from punk to grunge, and the vocals are just as direct as you would expect from an artist who is not afraid of telling it like it is! There is also room for an excellent punk cover: a rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues,” which was made famous by the late great Johnny Cash. This cover really makes me think of bands such as Social Distortion, who also managed to release a stunning Johnny Cash cover (of the song “Ring Of Fire.”) There is something about Cash’s music, which really works with punk rock, and the intensity of the lyrics really work with Ember’s unique twist.

Ultimately, I would definitely recommend listening to this particular release, especially if you enjoy the sound of artists such as Against Me! (with the amazing Laura Jane Grace), Cloud Nothings, Dead Rituals, as well as Blink-182, only to mention but a few. Any punk rock fan is immediately going to connect with the sound and feel of this release, which brings such an immediate and easy-to-relate sound to the table, appealing to any fan of great alternative music in general. Ember is a very honest artist, the kind who is not afraid of sharing her feeling and pouring her heart out. Some people never seem to understand this, but even punk rock can be quite an intimate and personal style of music, especially if an artist is as honest and forward-thinking as Ember is, with a willingness to share everything about herself and her vision with the audience. In addition to that, this song has a really beautiful approach to production, and the sound might remind you of some of the best first-wave of punk music, with a bit of a contemporary twist as well for good measure!

Find out more about Ember Mikayla, and do not miss out on this new studio EP, which is currently available on the web.

https://open.spotify.com/album/0pjYi3QoDjZiILne4Vk4oh?si=J9d5cftRTJ2poddL0N3TXw

https://youtube.com/channel/UCBpZ-V4Af34dR-i8rVoroJA

https://www.tiktok.com/@embermikayla

https://www.facebook.com/embermikaylamusic/

https://www.instagram.com/embermikaylamusic/?hl=en

(via https://open.spotify.com/album/0pjYi3QoDjZiILne4Vk4oh?si=EW9kZNsjSYem2HPBTNSSOA)

We also had the chance to ask Ember a few questions: keep reading for more!

I love how you manage to render your tracks so personal and organic. Does the melody come first, or do you focus on the melodies the most?

Usually I usually write the lyrics first but not always. I do have a lot of lyrics that don’t have” music but there are times when i write a really cool riff and add words later. Sometimes I write both together.

Did you perform live before COVID? If so, do you feel more comfortable on a stage or within the walls of the recording studio?

I have performed live before but not with this work that I’m doing now. I have been in bands in the past that did live shows. I do have some social anxieties and get nervous on stage but as soon as I start playing they seem to melt away into the music. Having said that the studio is easier for me not just because of my anxieties but also scheduling with my kids.

If you could only pick one song to make a “first impression” on a new listener, which song would you pick and why?

Probably “Anarchist Skirt” because it kinda gives my background. It explains that I’m a trans woman and that I had a rough life. Also it tells that I’m an anarchist. Those are the things i write about the most, my life experiences and my ideas on anarchy.

What does it take to be “innovative” in music?

I just write and play what I feel. I think that is the best thing anyone can do. Be true to yourself and tell your story. That always makes the best music to me.

Any upcoming release your way?

Yes. I am currently working on a new full length album. I do not have a release date yet but hopefully in the next few months. There is a double album dropping on Jan. 22 titled “F**k You” with tracks that have already been released before but for some reason there was trouble and it was pulled from some places. If you heard the “Heading North” album it is that but with and extra 10 songs that are old acoustic recordings of mine.

Anywhere online where curious fans can listen to your music and find out more about you?

I’m on Spotify, Apple music, Youtube, and all other streaming services. You can also find me on Facebook, Instagram, twitter, tumblr, and tik tok. Just search ember mikayla or ember mikayla music on any of those and you will find me

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dragynkeep · 5 years ago

Note

ironwood vs yang

Kiwi, I know why you asked and I’m here to give you the tea for your birthday. I don’t know when your birthday is but I’m saying it’s today.

The most notable thing with Yang and Ironwood is that they have similar MOs when it comes to fighting. They’re both tanks that emphasize on strength in their attacks, with both implementing boxing moves and have shown to be agile with ease in advancing through changing terrain. Yet the similarities stop there when you look further in.

Going off their similar fighting styles, Ironwood has the advantage over Yang in that he actually fights with proper form and stances. I’ve highlighted it in my Taiyang vs Yang match up, but Yang has terrible form. It’s way too easy to knock her off balance or sweep her legs because she doesn’t provide a stable ground to build herself off on, too often flinging herself upwards with the risk of her enemy just blocking and disrupting her attacks. When you compare that to Ironwood, he clearly has not only the weight but the stance behind his attacks.

This case of superior experience and knowledge goes into how they use their weapons too. Yang continues to risk toppling herself while Ironwood uses that stability.

Yang’s back foot it off the ground, no longer able to support the force pushing her back from Ember Celica’s shot .Meanwhile, Ironwood has both legs planted firmly on the ground, ready for even distribution of not only his weight, but the recoil of his weapon. No knocking this man over.

And this feeds into their experience in battle. Ironwood is over twice Yang’s age, and had fought far longer than she had. Given that he’s the General of the Atlesian Military, he would’ve had to graduated from Atlas Academy and worked his way similar to Winter and the Ace Ops. Compare this to Yang, who has not even finished her first year of Beacon and hasn’t been given formal training after that, as well as having only been trained by Taiyang since she was old enough to fight.

The first serious fight for Yang was the Breach, before that she was fighting petty criminals and low level Grimm. Compare that to the numerous battles that Ironwood had been in, one that had cost him half his body and given him PTSD, and it’s clear just how different their experiences are.

Another point is that CQC makes up a good amount of Yang and Ironwood’s fighting. They can both go longer distance away with Ember Celica and Due Process, but both their respective fights show that they prefer to get in close and pummel their opponents. While boxing is shared by both Yang and Ironwood, Ironwood has shown some judo moves from his fight with the Beowolf in Volume 3. Yang is the strongest physically of Team RWBY, but Ironwood outclasses her in weight and strength without even taking into account their prosthetics.

Also a side note: If they cannot rely on Aura to protect them, Yang is at more risk of damage with her prosthetic arm compared to Ironwood. While the metal has been built to withstand higher levels of damage, the muscle and bone around it has a lower threshold. This means increased risk of damaged muscle, tendons, and even fractured or broken bones. Ironwood’s prosthetics covering half of his body has the plus of being stabilized to his core rather than an external limb.

Back to the CQC, Yang would need to get close to use a wide range of her fighting skills, and that’s the worst place to be with Ironwood. Watts was smart enough to keep his distance from Ironwood for a majority of their fight, and use the Arena to trip Ironwood up, because he knew that if he got into a straight up fight with the General, he would lose. Yang doesn’t have the technology that Watts has, she needs to get up close to fight.

Going into their weapons, Due Process and Ember Celica are quite similar despite not looking it. Both are dual weapons that are used by their owners to speed themselves up and traverse through changing environment. Yang uses shotgun blasts to fling herself through the air, Ironwood achieves the same effect with gravity bullets. Both give them a bonus to their speed and movement, but come at the cost that their ammo is limited.

However, if Yang runs out of bullets, Ember Celica is purely defense with her prosthetic adding damage due to being made of metal. Yang can’t really use them as a weapon due to their positioning on her arms. If Ironwood runs out of bullets, he can still flip Due Process around and use the butt of the pistols for extra damage, and we’ve seen how damaging they can be on his own robotic soldiers.

As mentioned before with Yang’s slimmer frame giving her more natural agility at the cost of strength, and Ironwood’s larger frame giving him more strength at the cost of movement, there’s also the fact of energy conservation. With my previous match up, I’ve already mentioned that Yang tends to waste energy and momentum with unnecessary spins and telegraphed attacks. Seeing Ironwood fight shows that he is way better at judging attacks and conserving energy when needs be.

Look at that combat roll. He moves with the forward momentum when he goes too far and uses the roll to keep on going, that’s hot af.

The same issues as before rise with Semblances. We don’t know Ironwood’s, and Yang’s has serious drawbacks as it does with Taiyang. However, rather than it being Taiyang’s previous knowledge of Yang’s Semblance and ability to redirect the powered strikes, Ironwood has shown to have serious endurance and could tank the hits. This is the same man that degloved his own arm and managed to stay conscious, and more importantly coherent, not slip into shock, and finish the fight with Watts by slam dunking his face into the dirt. All without Aura.

Meanwhile Yang was rendered unconscious when her arm was amputated and she slipped into shock. The sheer difference between their endurance plays a lot when it comes to fighting, and more importantly when they can no longer rely on their Aura to protect them.

Final point is their mindset in battle. As not only the General, but a military man, Ironwood would’ve gone through training to control himself properly in combat, but Ironwood is still human, and a flawed one at that. Especially with his deteriorated mental health and PTSD, Ironwood does get more sloppy and favors strength and finishing a fight quickly over skill when it nears the end, as seen with his slip in standards near the end of his fight with Watts. On top of lowering his guard and underestimating Watts as a threat even when his gun had no ammo left, Ironwood does still make mistakes.

And so does Yang. She has improved since her time in Beacon, but she is still susceptible to letting her emotions push her, especially her anger. She can still grow impatient and rush into things, even if it’s been pulled back, and she can lose heart if certain buttons are pushed like when Adam temporarily gets to her by reminding her of Beacon. Would Ironwood do something like that when he knows what it’s like? No, but that doesn’t erase the fact that Yang can, and has, faltered in a fight, no matter how short-lived it is.

So considering all of these, the fight would have to go to Ironwood. He has the strength, the smarts, the experience, and the same fighting style as Yang with added perks. General Thicc got it.

As usual, special thanks to my friend Spec for providing the screenshots and for helping out with my thoughts

#the-kiwi-is-not-a-pewee #rwby #james ironwood #yang xiao long #rwby fighting asks #luke.txt #finally general thiccness got one

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History

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This article contains spoilers for The Long Song.

The Long Song is the first miniseries featured in PBS Masterpiece’s 50th Anniversary season, and it’s U.S. arrival nearly three years after airing on BBC One is highlighting themes that some viewers may not be ready to process but that remain incredibly important.

The show is an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel recounting the story of how Jamaican slaves gained their freedom in the 1830’s. Levy worked with white screenwriter Sarah Williams on the script for The Long Song before her death in 2019. Although some may want to criticize Williams’ involvement for removing the Own Voices status from the series, it is important to note she successfully worked with Levy to adapt Small Island into a TV miniseries which aired on Masterpiece in 2009. Critics and the Black British community alike praised the miniseries for featuring the Windrush Generation. Overall, the script of The Long Song maintains Levy’s vision without any evidence of the white gaze or other forms of editorial interference.

Each of the three episodes follows July (Tamara Lawrance), born into slavery, and how she later gains her freedom. She was taken from her mother Kitty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) who worked cutting sugarcane to serve as the ladies’ maid for Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell from Agent Carter). The Christmas Rebellion in 1831 followed by the subsequent Parliament bill banning slavery in Jamaica two years later and the changes to society that came as a result are told from her point of view. The story is told with a frame tale, as Older July (Doña Croll) narrates the events of her life in order to publish a book.

It is highly likely that, when the series first aired in the UK, decision-makers did not believe a story wholly focused on slavery in the Caribbean would be relevant to US audiences. Vice President Kamala Harris’ family background brings Jamaican history to the forefront. It is entirely feasible to imagine someone like July somewhere in her father’s ancestral line. Black History can’t be confined to just what happened in America when we’re discussing Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Although I haven’t been able to trace my own family tree from the nearby former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, I am reasonably sure my own ancestors have a similar story.

Masterpiece executive producer Susanne Simpson said in an interview that she is working with the UK and international production companies to address concerns that PBS series do not feature enough racial diversity. Some may see The Long Song as a step backward in that regard because it is a slavery-driven story, but this misses two important factors. First of all, The Long Song was not originally intended as a co-production with U.S. networks or streaming services. The primary target was U.K. readers of Levy’s book and Anglophone Caribbean audiences. Secondly, this is the first time a PBS scripted drama has centered slavery as the main plot point. Thirdly, new racially diverse scripted series that avoid and/or address those concerns are still at least a year or two from distribution.

Atwell’s Caroline, along with her relatives and guests, abuse July physically and emotionally. She is threatened with the lash for extremely minor offenses. Caroline calls her “Marguerite” most of the time because she refuses to see her as fully human. There are scenes where slaves are whipped and families separated. As July is the ladies’ maid, she has some power over fellow slaves such as Hannah (Jo Martin from Doctor Who). These aspects are not what makes The Long Song unique in comparison to recent TV series, such as the 2016 Roots miniseries as well as the 1970’s miniseries, The Book of Negroes and Underground. How the series highlights both Jamaican culture and how British colonialism affected society is what sets the show apart.

Since this show is set in the 1830’s, there is strong evidence of Black culture that is separate from the norms imposed by slaveholders. Although the language is at times dated (“pickaninny” also shortened as “pickney” is now an offensive term, for example), you still hear the accent unique to Jamaicans today. Lenny Henry’s voice as Godfrey is not entirely realistic for a slave who never left Jamaica, but this does take some prior knowledge of what a typical accent from the area should sound like. The soundtrack incorporates the musical styles unique to the island and the separate Christmas party the slaves held also brings this culture to life.

The racial caste system in Jamaica plays a huge role in the life of July and those around her. Her father, Tam Dewer (Gordon Brown), was the Scottish overseer of the plantation which gave her a higher status than many of her fellow slaves, despite her darker skin tone. Her friend and first romantic interest Nimrod (Jordan Bulger) is a free man but he ends up losing his status because white people decide he is guilty of a crime. Miss Clara (Madeline Mantock) is described as a quadroon (one-quarter African ancestry) and uses that background to secure a marriage that guarantees a higher status in society. Marriage as a form of social mobility would have been impossible in American slave societies because consensual interracial marriages or relationships were outlawed. July’s decision-making in Episodes 2 and 3 regarding the new head of the plantation, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden), is entirely influenced not only by her own desires and past trauma but also by the society around her.

Some may regard these plot developments as enforcing trauma-bonding stereotypes or problematic ideas about love under systems of oppression. July’s narration is tinged with romantic ideals that do not undergo serious scrutiny until later in the story. However, it is important to note that marriage was the only way a woman during this time period could secure financial stability that didn’t depend on agricultural labor. The color-based caste and class system did prevent some individuals from moving up in society, but intermarriages between whites, Africans, various immigrant laborers, and indigenous groups created an entire segment of society whose heritage was mixed. July’s relationship should be seen as an element of historical truth, likely from Levy’s ancestors. The conclusion of that part of the story drives home that many of these relationships between Black women and white male planters (plantation owners) were inherently unequal and exploitative. Any children from these relationships were also the property of the white men.

The last two episodes of the show discuss the fallout from the official end of slavery in Jamaica, a semi-equivalent to the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. Abolition did not mean the end of the white-dominated rule in Jamaica, as the British Empire ruled the island until 1962. Although Black plantation workers were paid wages to cut the sugarcane, they owed rent to the plantation owners. This was used to force workers to work longer hours for reduced compensation. July’s loyalties are divided between Goodwin and the field workers who she knows are being treated unfairly. Goodwin’s efforts to increase production failed as the workers went on strike. After the strikes, many former plantation workers moved inland to cultivate unclaimed territory, but independent farming led to poverty and illness. July may have had dreams of rising above the sugarcane workers, but economic racism dashed this dream.

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For many viewers, July’s journey is going to be incredibly triggering and emotionally draining but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The ending which reunites her with a piece of her long-forgotten past is incredibly satisfying. Levy’s novels have inspired many Black British writers and it is very possible post-pandemic that there will be more Black screenwriters telling their own stories and forgotten histories on screen.

The post How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History appeared first on Den of Geek.

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potteresque-ire · 6 years ago

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Daenerys Stormborn, First of Her Name

Here’s my first review post on Game of Thrones! Thank you so much for asking about Daenerys, @bixgirl1, @kikibluemay and @oceaxe-ifdawn. She was fascinating and tragic, and I couldn’t really stop talking about her... as in, I ended up writing a 4k+ word essay on her character.

Due to the length, I’ve crossed-posted to AO3 for those who prefer to read it there: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119595 . As usual, never feel obliged to do anything! Fandom is a happy, carefree place for me :) .

Before I start, I’d like to say this—I’ve never expected GoT to be progressive. Its medieval aesthetics aside, the gratuitous violence and nudity really seal the deal. Therefore, this review is written decidedly without a social justice lens; I shall not argue if the showrunners were feminists, racists, imperialists etc. Also, I haven’t read the books and have read few metas and reviews; so these are my unfiltered thoughts and of course, my personal opinion. I got interested in Game of Thrones because the snippets I knew of it reminded me of ancient Chinese history, which I loved for its twists, its very blurred lines between truths and myths, its cynical record of human nature, clever strategies and bloodshed. Along this vein, I was, and still am, the most interested in how each contender of the Iron Throne got there, and as the theme of the story emerged (“the lies we spin, our fates they weave” is my way of describing it), the things they told for motivation—the lies and truths that, should they win, would become history.

Of all the contenders and their stories, Daenerys’ rise was the most…mythical and uplifting. She was easy to root for, partly because we’re conditioned to root for heroes like her. The last descendant of a dynasty. Orphan. Exiled, abused, went through her personal journey from little better than a slave to become queen. She even birthed dragons and rode them to war. I really enjoyed the part of her story as the Khaleesi. She grew into a queen in every way, and an ideal one, by the time led her small group of followers across the desert. I loved her—she was strong, resilient, intelligent, righteous. And she understood and respected a culture that was supposedly far below her (as her brother Viserys frequently reminded everyone).

But then came Astapor, then Yunkai, then Meereen. She became a true ruler, without a Khal by her side…

I started feeling a little uncomfortable. I was puzzled by that. Her cause was emancipation, one I believe was absolutely correct. Her stance was uncompromising. She walked the walk. Every single one of these traits was beyond admirable, and precious among rulers. Nailing 163 slave masters for 163 children might seem brutal, but the world of GoT *was* brutal.

And yet, something felt...off.

Then I realized: after all the screen time in Meereen, I remained very much ignorant of the place, other than it practiced slavery. Slavery—and the barbaric practices surrounding it, such as the fighting pits—was presented as the only thing that defined her new constituents in her eyes. This could be by design, to show Daenerys’ “style” as a ruler. This can also be a reflection of the showrunners’ perspectives, their disquiet about tackling slavery for a larger audience. But if I must judge the show by its own merits and ignore the hands behind it, the repeated shots of Daenerys sitting high in the Great Pyramid, she and her advisors donned in their foreign attire, telling the locals who looked nothing like them, over and over again, that they were wrong…

She looked like a coloniser. My radars were beeping for that reason. I grew up in a colony, a well cared for one (ie, it would’ve fared far worse if it hadn’t been colonised). Colonialism is therefore an integral part of my life, and my views of it are coloured and educated by the experience. Controversial point: far from a general rule, but I recognise that colonizers can do great good. I’m a beneficiary of that myself. However, I’ve also learned that there’s an art to bringing these great goods to the colonised. One lesson: defining these people, especially when they’re foreign to the ruler, with anything that the ruler is seeking to eradicate — a habit, a tradition, a set of beliefs… —is not a recipe for success. It’s a matter of human pride—the pride of, in this case, the people who’d just suffered defeat. The former ruling class needs to feel some respect, which translates to a sense of security, for any transition of power to be smooth. One may say, the slave masters deserved neither pride nor respect nor security; this is very true, but there was a very practical consideration, one that Daenerys acknowledged: the ultimate goal of conquest is to rule. An un-governable colony won’t change for the better, because it won’t remain a colony for long. In Meereen, as in many real-world colonies, colonisers were few and their constituents were many. Revolts would favour the latter, in particular, the former ruling class who often had both financial and geographical advantages. The Sons of Harpy’s revolt did address that, albeit weakly.

No, I don’t mean Daenerys should yield on the issue of slavery. Lives were at stake and the emancipation had to be immediate. But then, merely insisting this was the right thing to do and punishing offenders with increasing severity, while reinforcing the segregation between the ruling class and the ruled (Daenerys pretty much sequestered herself in the Great Pyramid), was not a direction to take to render the emancipation permanent. Daenerys had to be out there. She had to make serious effort to find common grounds in the 3-way between herself, the former slaves and former slave owners, especially after she’d removed one of the pillars of Meereen’s sociopolitical structure. It didn't matter that the latter were despicable; she had to find a connection. And being a nation that had stood thousands of years, with its wealth and fine architecture, Meereen had got to have something benign and beautiful that Queen Daenerys could embrace, that she could use as a bridge to endear her to her constituents and at the same time, de-emphasize the role of slavery in defining what Meereen was. Wear their clothes. Visit the temples. Whether she actually believed in their gods didn’t matter. Join their festivities—if she did it enough it would matter much less if she skipped the fighting pits. Go to their Flea’s Bottom equivalent (as Margaery Tyrell did in King’s Landing; she would’ve made a good colonial governor). Talk to their craftsman and ask about their traditional crafts. Never for once did Daenerys consider these strategies. She could’ve used Tyrion as her ambassador—his stature and broken language skills, if utilized correctly, could loosen people’s defense, and the parties he’d attend would give him access to the good wines he craved and the setting for him to establish alliances with small talks. If governing foreign lands is indeed an art form, Daenerys didn’t pursue it in Meereen, even though from her time with the Dothrakis, it seemed unlikely that she was ignorant of its necessity (She did eat a horse heart for her Khal and her unborn child).

Again, assuming that the writers were merely following GRRM’s guideposts on her character arc, I had to contend with these possibilities that inform me about Daenerys the Ruler: 1) somewhere in her journey in Essos, she’d lost her ability to empathize with the cultures under her rule. This seemed unlikely. Or, 2) she no longer felt the need to do it, her power no longer derived from a Khal. Either way, with Westeros also being foreign to Daenerys, I started to wonder the kind of ruler she would end up being …

… and it looked rather similar to the Daenerys in her final scenes, asserting that her moral compass should make the entire Westeros bent their knees. I started to wonder if the show intended this to be a good or bad thing, or something more nuanced, as it should be. My hopes weren’t high—after all, our own western world still retains much of its colonial sensibilities, which would’ve (rightly) praised Daenerys’ role as a Liberator, but would also (sub)consciously downplay her … colonising tendencies.

Does it mean I see Daenerys as a bad person, or going mad? Not at all. Conflating character and ability to rule is, IMO, one of the major weaknesses of her ending (more on that later); it was also, perhaps ironically, Daenerys’ own fatal mistake. My question is merely one about her fitness to rule, which is itself a fluid thing. War-time rulers require different skills compared to peace-time rulers, conquerors to defenders. The serious contenders of the Iron Throne each had their own strengths, some better suited for rulership and some better for rulership at different times. Stannis was a strong general but was too easily swayed as a ruler. Daenerys was a conqueror. Jon Snow was a diplomat.

One thing, however, is true and consistent in the world of GoT: to gain power, being morally righteous is not enough. Ned Stark’s detached head brought this point across all too well. Rulers win the hearts of their people. Not the brains, not the logic that decides what is right or wrong. Humans are inherently passionate about power, whether it’s theirs to own or not.

And this is, perhaps, Daenerys Stormborn’s greatest tragedy. She assumed her strict moral compass, along with her birthright and strong will, would be sufficient to take her to the Iron Throne. Her dragons further misguided her in that regard—punishments by Dracarys lent an extra mythical weight and poetry to her judgments, as if she had a higher power, like God, on her side. When she asked Jon Snow if she was to rule with love or fear, she asked as if the two were a dichotomy, seemingly blind to the fact that she had always treaded the line between the two. Love got her the Unsullied, the talents who came far and wide to advise her; fear got her the Dothrakis, the fragile peace in Essos.

If you’ve read till here (thank you), you may assume I’d defend Daenerys’ decision to burn King’s Landing, or suggest it was foreshadowed. I’d say this: I find it to be within the realms of possibility, but only given my personal opinion about her rule in Meereen. I don’t see it as a botched coin-flip by the Gods, because nothing in her prior judgment suggested madness. Yes, she’d ignored advice before, but no more than, say, Robert Baratheon or Joffrey (Cersei simply killed those who gave her advice she didn’t like). Daenerys’ decision to march to King’s Landing immediately after the Battle of Winterfell—the last major decision she made before the sacking—might not be wise to some but was logically sound. I’d also venture to say this, perhaps in defence of the show’s writers: I’m also not quite sure if the show intended her decision to be a proof of madness.

Because I’m not sure if the madness told in this show was real at all.

Because curiously, while the coin flip had been mentioned several times, the show never offered us any concrete, visual evidence that Daenerys had suffered a loss of reason, which defines madness for us who live on Earth in the 21st century. The destruction of King’s Landing was portrayed at the ground level; we didn’t exactly see Daenerys cackling, or enjoying the carnage. Making a terrible decision does not a mad person make. She was seen to be sure of herself in her final scene with Jon Snow—but why shouldn’t she be, when she’d just emerged victorious and achieved her life’s goal, her revenge? If cockiness had been the mark of madness, half of the characters in the show would’ve been mad.

Even more curious to me is this: people like Ramsey or Joffrey or Cersei, who’d done seriously mad things in our perspective, were never once described as “mad”. The adjective “Mad” had always been reserved for the Mad King.

How was the Mad King mad then? This is important, because Daenerys supposedly inherited his madness. But the audience hadn’t been given much information. We know The Mad King killed his dissidents, but that seemed to fall within standard monarch behaviour. We know he and his advisors—including, notably, Varys—were at increasing odds with each other, but put a bunch of power-hungry men with immense power imbalance in the same room and that would happen more likely than not. He killed Ned Stark’s father and brother in a confrontation—so he was vengeful, distrustful, and brutal, yes, just like Joffrey or Cersei, but still, nothing that spoke particularly of madness. He was said to want King’s Landing destroyed, but the act was never realized; we only learned of his intentions via Jaimie. He set up the network of wildfires, which were terrible weapons but also … traditional in the Targaryen dynasty, if wildfires had indeed been invented as replacements of Dracarys. So how mad was actually the Mad King then, compared to his ancestors? Or was he called Mad only because he lost his game of thrones, and history was written by victors? When Varys claimed to be worried about Daenerys’ state—when he hinted at her madness and being a bad coin flip—was he merely repeating the same lies that had been told about her father, with the purpose of setting up a chain reaction that would propel Jon Snow to the Iron Throne, as the same lies had helped justify and cement Robert Baratheon’s reign? Varys might have been trying to feed Daenerys something. A “crazy potion”, maybe?

Yes, I know. I’m probably reading too much into this. It’s my wishful thinking, perhaps, to not see Daenerys as mad (or the writers writing her as mad) because that would’ve taken away her agency. Because Daenerys’ character arc doesn’t deserve an ending equivalent to death by a falling flowerpot. Because, if her sacking of King’s Landing was meant to be the Shock of Season 8, she must retain her agency. It’s shocking because a good person did it. A good person is good only when she has the agency to make terrible mistakes.

So how am I reading Daenerys’ decision to sack King’s Landing? If I were to ignore all inputs outside the show—I don’t know if the showrunners had commented on anything—this is how I would “bridge the gap”, so to speak; how I’d imagine the thoughts running through Daenery’s mind as the bells rang, behind the few seconds the camera focused on Emilia Clark’s face in the show. I believe the series of tragedies Daenerys had suffered (losing Jorah, Missandei, a dragon son) had only made her more determined to wipe out, as Greyworm told Jon, everyone who’d served Cersei. But while this sounded like a simple task, carrying it out was much more complicated. Cersei’s armies were dispersed all over the city; they could easily remove their armour and feign innocence. Moreover, every resident in King’s Landing could be seen as an accomplice to Cersei’s reign; even the people in Flea’s Bottom, like Gendry, used to make weapons for the Lannisters. Were they to be wiped out as well? If not, where to draw the line? This order nonetheless confirmed Daenerys’ world view that the morally corrupt should perish without mercy, and Cersei was, indeed, corruption defined. Daenerys had seen Cersei’s treachery herself, and the sheer scale of it must be as foreign to her as Westeros itself. Her closest friends and followers, Greyworm and Missandei, didn’t even know how to tell a joke—the smallest, most benign form of treachery. Daenerys knew what treachery was, of course, she’d suffered greatly from it, but treachery in the game of thrones was a different beast and she wasn’t yet equipped to handle it, to make correct assessments of the kind of behaviours it’d instigate—unlike Cersei and Tyrion, who as Lannisters had been breathing it in since birth, or Varys, who’d been both an observer of multiple reigns and a ruthless Kingmaker himself. King’s Landing, the city itself, had also signified little but treachery to Daenerys—her father had been murdered there by someone who’d sworn to protect him; men had been sent from there to murder her since she’d been born.

While Tyrion had told said that Cersei’s armies were serving only out of fear, Daenerys, who’d only had the most faithful / honest armies, the Unsullies and Dothrakis, probably couldn’t truly appreciate what that meant. She had every cause to be terrified then when the bells rang, especially when they rang so early, without her or her army and allies even close to the Red Keep. Ironically, perhaps, her own moral righteousness became her blind spot; she might have assumed Cersei’s forces had something far more sinister waiting for her—because how could they abandon their duties, their queen so easily?

And if they did abandon their duties and their queen so easily, what would stop them from committing the same treachery when Daenerys becomes queen herself? How could she vet the innocent and the treacherous and if she couldn’t—and she couldn’t, not with one dragon, a small army and no geographical advantage—what could she do? What could she do, when she was Daenerys Stormborn, who would never compromise to treachery?

I can see her feeling cornered. I can see her feeling she was left with one option: take the innocents out with the treachery. Do it like removing a tumour. Cut out a ring of good flesh around the bad.

The ring of good flesh was King’s Landing.

Plausible? Maybe? That tragically, both the rise and fall of Daenerys Targaryen could be attributed to her moral code? That she didn’t lose this game of thrones because she was evil, but because war and politics have always been amoral and she was a misfit? People in Westeros change allegiance all the time; morals are fluid and carry a price tag. Appropriately then, the man who understood and lived by these rules, whose loyalty could always be bought—Bronn—was also the biggest winner of this game of thrones.

I’d say this though: a plot point as significant, and as close to the finale as the sacking of King’s Landing, shouldn’t require the audience twisting their minds into pretzels to make it feel plausible, and my brain feels a bit pretzly at a moment. No matter what the writers intended, there remained too many holes for the watchers to fill with their imagination. I’ve read some who said the final season was too rushed; I’m not sure that was the issue. The issue, I think, is that even if given enough screen time, the writers didn’t quite know how to drive the characters without the books’ guidance—an issue that had become apparent by Season 6. The last three seasons felt…derivative, like fanfics of the first four. This isn’t a slight (well, not a big one)—Benioff and Weiss had managed what GRRM hasn’t been able to—but I felt a sense that their visions of the world had evolved to conflict with GRRM’s over the course of the show. Meanwhile, they still needed to hit the goal posts GRRM provided, while they wanted to focus on / believe in something else. The result was the later seasons that felt …schizophrenic at times. GoT had highly implausible moments since Season 1, but the first four seasons sold them because the showrunners believed in them. S8 Ep5&6, meanwhile, offered enough for me to logically agree that the sacking of King’s Landing and Daenerys’ downfall can be canon, but not enough for me to believe emotionally because…I didn’t feel the showrunners believed in them. The events felt written to serve a purpose other than storytelling—maybe to match GRRM’s notes, or satisfy the perceived need to shock; in all cases, I felt the hearts of the writers were somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more spectacular than dissecting the motivations of a fallen queen. The shift towards visual storytelling in the later seasons, perhaps to mitigate the difficulty of writing dialogues for an ensemble of deeply complex and intertwined characters, furthered exposed the incoherence of the show’s focus. While I love the visuals, GoT had its origins as a political show and politics is 99% talk. Similarly, the increased reliance on the actors to convey their characters via facial expressions and body language might work for someone like Brienne, who was taciturn and largely consistent personality wise, but insufficient for characters who used talking as a weapon (Tyrion) or underwent major transformations (Daenerys).

Anyway, back to Dany. If there was one thing I truly, truly dislike about the close of her story arc, it was the very end, when Jon Snow drove that dagger into her. Painfully cliche aside (I’ll leave Cersei’s baby to another day), it also unfairly cemented Daenery’s highly un-rightful place as the villain of the story, given that Jon Snow, the uncontested Good Human of the show, committed the murder. The show pitted two sympathetic characters against each other just to let one … leech the sympathy out of the other, when neither of their characters deserved the treatment (yes, I found this decision to be as unfair to Jon Snow as it was to Daenerys). As much as I had reservations about Daenery’s ability to govern, I never doubted the heart that Jon stabbed, the desire in it to do good for the people. Yes, I said it isn’t enough, and yes, I believe that too inflexible a moral code forcibly imposed upon others can do great damage, but this is very different from saying that Daenerys Stormborn was a villain. Conflating character and ability is human, but I expected this show to know enough nuance to avoid this mistake. Having the heart, the desire to rule well, is a start. A great and important start. A start seen in few others in the whole series. The early seasons of GoT were particularly strong in depicting characters in the grey but Daenerys, sadly, was robbed of that; she swung violently from white to black.

And what was so disappointing is that it needn’t be that way. Daenerys could have caused the destruction to King’s Landing and still be sympathetic. Queen Cersei was still in the Red Keep, and the Wildfires buried by the Mad King remained all over the city. Innocents die in wars, there’s never an exception to that, even if the wars are waged with the best intentions. I’m no show writer, but this is what I could come up with to spare Daenery’s fate as a villain after a few walking trips around my city, while keeping most major plot points intact. Show writers can do (much) better.

Just for the fun of it, below is the alternative ending for Daenerys I came up with, and I will end my very, very long thesis here :) . Thank you so, so much for reading! ❤️❤️❤️

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1) Start of the episode. Qyburn teaching his little birds a nursery rhyme about a Mad King and his Wildfires, and an Evil Queen who will set them all burning. He tells them to sing far and wide. (This is just an excuse to get another song from Ramin Djawadi)

2) Long shots of combustibles being laid in the same tunnels Lancel Lannister crawled through back in Season 6 Ep 10, before the explosion of the Sept of Baelor. That 10-minute sequence was so classic that the audience would likely remember the place. Piles of wood connect the stores of barrels that we know contain the Wildfires. Black tar flows down the sewers of the Red Keep, down the alleys in Flea Bottom, slicking everything, staining the innocents there with (Queen Cersei’s) muck. This sequence can be done entirely through visuals.

3) The Bell rings. Daenerys attacks the Red Keep with Dracarys. The tar and wood catch fire and carry the flames to the Wildfires around the city. As Wildfire is Dracarys’ substitute, the two augments each other and the city soon turns into an Inferno. Daenerys watches, horrified and unable to do a thing. The nursery rhyme becomes a prophecy: as much as a Lannister laid the grounds, the Targaryens are solely responsible for the King’s Landing destruction. Woods and tar are, after all, harmless without fire. And Daenerys Stormborn, who swore to protect and liberate the weak, ends up killing more innocents than Cersei ever had.

4) Tyrion advises Daenerys that for now, she has no choice but to rule by fear. A reign cannot start with apologies, and what good will it do? So Daenerys gives the same speech to her armies on the steps of the ruined Red Keep, but noticeably distraught.

5) Daenerys must also restrain Drogon. She can’t afford him accidentally setting more fires in the city, while her armies scour every tunnel to make sure all Wildfires have been consumed. So the Breaker of Chains is forced to chain down her son, the symbol of her power.

6) Drogon, being intelligent but still a beast, maims Daenerys badly in his struggle to be free. Jon finds Daenerys, but she’s beyond saving. She tells Jon to keep what he saw secret, and if he can’t—she knows he can’t—to please lie for her, for once, that Drogon did it to avenge for the innocents she killed; that Drogon, and their family name he represents, knows justice above the fire and blood. When honest Jon reacts…honestly, she asks him to ask Tyrion for advice. She struggles to stand, says she wants to try the Iron Throne before she goes. She refuses Jon’s help; she walks, head high, blood trailing like a cape behind her, as she crosses the ruins. She won’t make it. Only her finger will get to touch the Iron Throne, as in her prophecy in the House of the Undying. Jon kneels behind her as she falls on her own knees. She will always be his queen. Drogon carries her away.

7) The waiting period can be a mourning period for all who have perished. Tyrion will still recommend Bran to be their King, as his proposal will be accepted as he remains the Hand. Jon would’ve asked Tyrion about the lying, and the issue can be brought up when “A Song of Ice and Fire” is presented in the small council. King Bran can then offer his wisdom as the Three-Eyed Raven, the Living History. What does he think, when he sees both the truth in history and the lies and prophecies told about it, that propel it? Does he approve of them? Disapprove? This will also wrap up the theme of the show, about the stories that make history, the history that makes us. Ser Davos can ask about the legend of Azor Ahai that cost Stannis Baratheon everything. Is it true? Does it matter? Also, how many swords actually make up the Iron Throne? Thousands, as the legends and Daenarys had believed? No more than two hundred, as Little Finger said in Season One? How many more swords have been buried for these thousands or hundreds?

#got #got spoilers #daenerys targaryen #dany targaryen #pie reviews GoT #pie metas

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thefloatingstone · 6 years ago

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In 2012 I did not think I’d be able to make this list as I was convinced anime was on a permanent decline towards nothing but trash, but I am so happy that has changed! And so I give you a quick list of;

Favourite Anime made in the last 4 years!

Mob Psycho 100 (2016)

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A no brainer, really. With a 2nd Season having JUST premiered earlier this week, MP100 is easily one of not only best LOOKING animes in a very very long time, but also one with an extremely strong empathetic message that’s completely opposite to most shounen anime. The theme of “having outrageous powers doesn’t make you any more or less special and important than any other human being” and how all the villains in the show are people, either super powered or not, who believe themselves “more important” than others is at the heart of its story. And our protagonist who is a person with horrifically strong powers, but who is trying to develop as a human being, and finds himself to be a rather emotionally brittle person who relies very heavily on others for emotional support. As well as focusing on the people willing to grant him that. It’s got some strong influential roots in the Earthbound and Mother 3 games and despite never saying anything along those lines, I can bet you anything the original Mangaka, ONE, drew heavy inspiration from their tone and presentation, as well as emotional core despite the oftentimes wacky setting.

The anime should also not be overlooked for its incredible Sakuga sequences, as well as using mixed media in its animation from pencil drawings, to paint of glass, to charcoal to sand, cementing it as easily one of the most visually interesting and ambitious shows in the last decade or so

Made in Abyss (2017)

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An anime that understands concepts of Scope and Scale and manages to bring what is normally reserved for feature films to an episodic storyline. Made in Abyss’ entire theme and story is that of exploration of the unknown and everything in this anime’s power is honed to bring across that feeling. Its art direction headed by Osamu Masuyama whose previous work include working on the background art for both Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, is painstakingly rendered to bring as much gravitas to the setting as possible, aided by the soundtrack written by Kevin Penkin which is just as much atmospheric as it is musical in nature. Every ounce of talent is focused on making Made in Abyss’ world, culture and characters feel solid and real. And unlike other anime with cutesy art styles but dark subject matter, Made in Abyss’ darker tone is established right in the first episode and gradually builds to its first season’s climax, rather than blindside its audience out of nowhere.

I sincerely cannot sing this show’s praises enough.

It also doesn’t hurt that the animation itself is fluid and lively.

Re:Creators (2017)

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When I gave this to an animator friend of mine, one who is NOT as big a weeb as I am, he referred to it as “if Ready Player One actually knew what it was doing.” Re:Creators is one of a trend of some anime where the narrative is extremely meta in nature, but rather than use this as a form of parody, Re:Creators instead focuses itself on using its meta storytelling to shine a light on Japanese popular media as a whole, both from the side of the creators who MAKE such things, as well as the side of the fans and not only their response to media, but their interpretation and addition to popular media. And unlike the more critical approach several horror anime have taken in the past, Re:Creators also shows the positive effect stories in the form of anime, video games, manga etc both on those who read it as well as those who create it. And show how fan creations and their responses and reaction to media are just as important and enriching to works like this as the very people who create them.

It’s also one of the first shows from any country that correctly portrays what online fan culture is like. Both good AND bad.

Erased (2016)

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HOO BOY. The Big Guns. Most mainstream anime set in a modern setting inevitably seem to involve high school or at least characters who are high school aged. Erased, however, deals with a protagonist who is 28 years old. Due to time travel shenanigans, he is transported back to 1989 when he was 11 years old growing up in Hokaido. So already, this anime is complete skewing the generic setting for stories of its type, further hammered in by the fact that the show has no romantic subplot in it. There might be a smidge of something like “preteen romantic feelings” among the children but as far as “female hero the protag is going to fall in love with at the end” goes? Yeah there’s none of that.

Erased is an extremely dark anime, but not in the way Made in Abyss is dark. Whereas Abyss’ dark tone comes from things like getting eaten by monsters and body horror caused by the Abyss’ curse, the dark theme of Erased on the other hand is much more horrifying as it comes from “reality”. And it’s because of this I WILL have to warn people about its plot points because it WILL and DOES get uncomfortable.

The plot of Erased is our 28 year old protagonist gets hurled back in time to when he was 11 years old in Hokaido, as I said. In the winter of 1989 there were a string of child abductions and murders, and it’s up to our main character, again in his 11 year old body, to solve these crimes to prevent a tragedy in modern day. Not only does the show deal with the very uncomfortable topic of child abduction and murder, but a MASSIVE part of the plot revolves around the would be murder victim, Hinazaki Kayo, who is living with her physically abusive mother. And unlike shows like “Magical Girl SITE”, the abuse is not shown as “suffer porn” and blown up to be so over the top in how bad it is, ut is instead extremely grounded and feels waaaay to real to the point of being very upsetting. However, the abuse is not there to make the audience sad. The abuse is in the plot to further press upon the audience the borderline helpless state our main character is in. As a child, he has to rely on his experience and ability to think like an adult to try and prevent the serial murders, as WELL as try and get Hanazaki out of her abusive situation. It also serves as a learning experience for our main character, and him figuring out how he hasn’t changed at all since he really was a child, and how his own stagnation in life itself needs to change and be redirected. The show is bursting with tension and every episode exists to turn the stakes up just a little bit higher.

I’ve heard some people are extreme disappointed by the show’s ending which I will not spoil, but personally going into it completely blind, I didn’t find any of it to be a let down and its very quickly become one of my favourite anime of all time.

The Ancient Magus Bride (2017)

(I actually don’t like the intro to Ancient Magus Bride so it only gets a link since I can only embed 5 videos)

https://youtu.be/KuZbmLLv1vM

Based on a manga by Kore Yamazaki, who has stated that her reason for writing the story was out of frustration that in “Beauty and the Beast” type stories, the beast always turns back into a human at the end. However this anime is far more than just a monsterfucker’s romance novel (although it... DOES follow a LOT of those tropes but hear me out.)

Set in the English countryside (although our female MC, Rise, is herself Japanese) the show makes heavy use of english folklore. Faeries are a constant presence throughout the show, and these are not the “nice” kind of faeries you’d see in Disney. Despite theyr good nature and honest want to help, these are the kinds of faeries that will kidnap you to their realm if you so much as let your guard down. We also have excellent portrayals of Titania, the queen of the faeries, and her heated relationship with her husband Oberon. Several other creatures from folklore make an appearance too, as well as old traditions such as faerie rings, seeing stones and the magical properties of herbs and flowers.

But beyond all of that, and even beyond the romance tropes or monster protector who is also a threat and powerful lead female who also needs protecting, the core theme of the show is on life. Or more specifically, death. Rise is a girl who is suicidal. And despite her not making any kind of suicide attempt in the show, this is a fact. The majority of the show is focused on Rise learning to “be alive” again, as well as process what life is, as well as what death is in its many forms. The show is a slow build of Rise reclaiming her will to live, not because of a romantic partner, but for herself. Reclaiming her own importance as a person removed from who she could be useful towards, and a slow coming to terms with a truly terrible event in her past and letting go of a traumatic past.

The show has some pacing issues here and there, but I still qualify it as one of the better modern anime shows to have come out in years, and can only praise its life-affirming message it’s trying to tell.

Osomatsu-San (2015)

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I am.... not entirely sure how to explain Osomatsu-San.

Based on a manga published in the 1960s by Doraemon Creator Fujio Fujiko about 6 identical sextuplet brothers and their friends... the current and newest anime adaptation has borderline nothing to do with its original incarnation which was more your typical Showa era “hi-jinx” type gag manga. I think the very first episode of Osomatsu-San (which is not available for official purchase last I checked due to copyright issues) sets up the entire show perfectly, as the 6 boys and their friends learn they have a new anime adaptation coming up and realise that nobody in the modern age will want or even understand Showa era manga. So, instead, in an effort to be like “a real anime” they go about parodying literally every popular trope and show that’s out at the time. From yaoi-incest baiting to Jpop boy band to Attack on Titan to Sailor Moon, they keep cranking up the “modern anime” aesthetic until it literally explodes and collapses in on itself. And after realising they don’t have what it takes to compete in a modern anime word, the characters resign themselves to being losers who will never achieve anything in life.... and that’s where the show starts.

I can only refer to the show as “Millennial humour: the anime.”. 90% of it is just comedy with our 6 main characters who are, at their core, pretty terrible people. However, their issues and struggles of trying to be adults make them some of the most relateable anime characters out there. The show bounces from parodying popular culture both in anime as well as in movies to outlining the problems of trying to be a late 20-something year old in modern society to actual hard hitting drama that actually makes you angry because how DARE this stupid show actually make you FEEL things???

It’s borderline impossible to try and explain this show because, just like its 6 protagonists, it doesn’t seem to have any direction in its life. Which is exactly the point.

#anime #Long post #image heavy #video #recc #modern anime

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justgenlockthings · 6 years ago

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gen:VIEW Episode 1 “The Pilot”

You had RevieWBYs (from my other blog), now you get gen:VIEWs.

gen:LOCK was something I don’t think any of us quite trusted would be a good show. It wasn’t because there was anything in the marketing that suggested it would be bad, it was just we didn’t know anything about it. RT did a pretty poor job of convincing people it was worth watching for reasons beyond the fact that they’d somehow got Michael B. Jordan and friends to voice the main characters. Still, let’s be honest, that was always gonna make us want to check it out at least. And Rooster Teeth seemed to trust people would like it, despite (or perhaps in spite of) the increasingly vocal hate train that was chugging along right up until the final hours before the premiere.

It is clear to me that, much like many of Rooster Teeth’s other shows, gen:LOCK episodes are designed as singular parts of a cohesive whole, so I’m gonna try to avoid in these reviews addressing “The story needs this” as other, more experienced reviewers have said, because I acknowledge that this isn’t quite the complete story. gen:LOCK was created and released in the era of streaming television, where the whole thing will likely eventually work as a complete movie, so more than likely things that I think the story needs will be addressed later on. Nonetheless, it is still released in serialized installments, so if I feel the story does need something at a certain point, I will use how previous episodes were setting it up as evidence. However, I’m gonna try to avoid making too many story predictions in these reviews, because that has come to bite back many reviewers in the foot only an episode later (coughEruptionFangcough). Overall, my main interest is in evaluating how an individual episode is keeping me invested enough in the show to come back next week and find out more. Once we get to the end of the first season, I’ll go back and evaluate the complete story.

So. How was the first episode of gen:LOCK?

TL;DR It’s Actually Really Good

The opinions stated by Achievement Hunter, who previewed the show a few months early, included remarks that they couldn’t believe gen:LOCK was made by Rooster Teeth, because the quality of the animation and editing was on par with a Hollywood production. I didn’t quite believe that could possibly be the case until I sat down and watched the episode. I did a complete double-take: this was a Rooster Teeth production? The dialogue was snappy, the animation was beautiful, the sound design was incredible, the voice performances were...well some were better than others, but you could tell some of these were celeb voice actors.

"Surprise” is the emotion I had throughout the entire episode. Surprise at how high quality this show was in comparison with previous Rooster Teeth productions. Surprise at how well they built the world while still leaving some open details to be expanded on in later episodes, especially the still vague Polity-Union conflict. Some called the vagueness of that frustrating, but in terms of this episode I felt I saw enough that gave me the basic information for what the backdrop for this show will be.

The fact that I really got invested in Julian and Miranda as characters from the first episode caught me off-guard, because RT’s more recent ventures have usually taken a slow burn to get us invested in the story (Nomad of Nowhere being the clearest example). I thank the rollercoaster of emotions this episode put them through. From domestic to romance to action to tragedy to reunion, this episode established a strong relationship from the beginning that had to deal with the consequences of war. Their reactions to what was going on were believable: Chase sacrificing himself in the name of saving his family (whom we’d already gotten a chance to become invested in the opening scene), Miranda going from friendly to cold and distant due to a war that killed her boyfriend and so many of her squadmates. I assume we can thank the higher budget and thus the longer runtime for this episode for having the time to do all that, because if this were any of their, uh...other shows, they most likely would have rushed things way too quickly.

This episode also subverted what few expectations we had story-wise, but in a manner that didn’t seem disruptive at all. Lindsay Jones’s character was one of the early ones announced, and to see her go so abruptly was quite a shock. I thought Michael B. Jordan’s line read for “RAZZLE!” could’ve been better, but the build-up to her death got us invested in her character: she was a skilled combat pilot, she remained cool and collected in the heat of battle, and she flew a fucking plane backwards. Her death shocked not just because they killed one of their in-house personalities, but because we had been following her through quite a bit in only ten minutes. Likewise, the fact that Miranda Worth ended up being our POV for most of this was a surprise. Marketing for this show had only referred to her as “Julian’s love interest,” which is not exactly a flattering description of female character, and in a trope-conscious media industry generally spells fridging, killing her off in the name of Chase’s development. So, to apparently kill off Chase in the name of his development, and then have Miranda develop from it, was a pleasant subversion. I caught myself thinking “They killed off Michael B. Jordan because they couldn’t afford him!” before realizing “Wait, he’s an executive producer for the show, of course they could afford him.”

I can’t say I was surprised by Chase’s mech showing up in the Union ambush, since I’d already seen enough of the previews to know he had more appearances, but the moment was really beautifully done to the point that I felt pretty hyped. From Miranda giving herself up to potentially dying protecting the citizens, to Chase’s voice over her radio, and her realizing but not quite comprehending he was in the mech. I almost felt how much pain losing Chase had inflicted, and how much more painful it will be to know he’s been alive this whole time. Especially beautiful was the brief shot at the end of the episode where Chase and Miranda are looking at each other as though they are the only people in the room, and the lights fade on everyone else to the point that it’s literally the case. The emotional lovers’ reunion. The idea of seeing the dead come back to life. The painful conversations that are gonna have to happen because of it. I honestly didn’t care that I’d long ago realized Chase wasn’t dead, because I cared that Miranda was learning it now.

The other emotion I felt was relief. The framerate had been one of the biggest sources of criticism prior to release, with some taking it as a sign that gen:LOCK was lazily made. But I quickly discovered it was pretty easy to get used to the framerate, and that it didn’t distract me from the rest of the show. I shouldn’t have worried: the framerate was purely a style choice in how they rendered it, not a sign of incompetence. If people are hung up on the framerate though, well, I can understand that. It’s not particularly pleasant to look at at first, but there’s enough going on in the show that it shouldn’t bother you after a few minutes.

Now, to be frank, even though it didn’t bother me, the episode could’ve benefited from a little more insight into the Union-Polity conflict. To have such a major battle without quite knowing what the characters are fighting for has the potential to make the entire conflict feel hollow. But it has to be acknowledged: the Union-Polity conflict is mostly designed as the backdrop for these characters, so I can forgive it not being expounded upon in the first episode considering Julian and Miranda’s relationship is so prominent here. There’s still enough cool stuff going on in this episode that I can forgive a slight lack of storytelling focus, because goshdarnit I do love well-done spectacle.

Conclusions

If the teasers, trailers, and intro hadn’t quite sold me yet that gen:LOCK was gonna be a good show, the first five minutes of this episode completely won me over. This was unlike anything I’d ever seen before (not much of a mecha anime viewer), but especially not from Rooster Teeth. It had everything I could want from a show: good dialogue, strong characters, cool fight sequences. This was a show I could support. This was a show that I was gonna keep coming back to watch every week.

This was the show that had a second episode I needed to watch once I got back from a meeting at the school library with my final project team.

P.S. That intro though. Such a good hype song, and some really stunning visuals. I watched it the night before the premiere, and it was enough that I thought “Hey, this might not be a bad show after all.”

#gen:lock #gen:lock analysis #gen:lock reviews #gen:VIEW #gen:lock spoilers #analysis #spoilers #reviews

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brazenautomaton · 6 years ago

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here is a pitch for a playable Lady in Devil May Cry 5 that is probably unworkable and overly complex and nobody cares about but I am posting anyway because I like to do this sort of thing

Lady is a fusion of Nero (charge attacks that encourage striking at the right time instead of mashing, Wire snatch) and Dante (wide selection of available means of attack encouraging you to switch often). She has one melee weapon and four ranged weapons. She’s meant to be a Gunslinger that encourages more stylish and varied and mobile gameplay. She moves fast and has a good dodge but her life bar is only half the normal length because she doesn't have preposterous "let's stick swords in my chest" durability.

T: Close-Range Attack (Sawed-Off Shotgun) S: Basic Shot C: Advanced Shot (Gunslinger Style Action) X: Jump, Dodge (with R1+direction), Rocket Jump

L1: Overdrive R1: Lock-On L2: Explosive R2: Wire

D-pad: Select Weapon

Lady's close range weapon is a sawed-off shotgun with a much shorter range than Coyote-A. Gunslinger style actions go off of the Triangle button, except that Fireworks is spin+T, normal/combo attack shot is T, and tapping T during Gun Stinger turns it into a ground slide with a launching upward shot. Shotgun blasts can parry enemy attacks like a normal melee weapon. It cannot charge by holding down the button, but during Overdrive mode, its shots are much wider and have delayed explosions that increase the length of hitstun.

Lady's ranged weapons heat up while in use, changing their properties and eventually causing an overheat that renders them unusable. The invisible heat bar has 3 visible regions, indicated by the color of the circle around their icon: blue is cool, yellow is hot, red is very hot, and flashing a color with black means that the weapon has overheated and can't be used until it completely cools down to the very bottom of blue. Normal shots increase Heat by a smaller amount, and circle shots or special techniques increase Heat by larger amounts. Mashing the attack button faster than the attacks can come out still generates Heat for the nonexistent attacks (punishes button mashing, but also helps to build up from low heat levels).

Heat dictates the power of the weapon's attacks, so it is like Lady's weapons all charge like Nero's, and all charge automatically like Ebony and Ivory in Gunslinger mode. However, low/blue heat corresponds to uncharged attacks, medium/yellow heat is level 2 charge, and high/red heat is level 1 charge. Heat goes down over time whether a weapon is equipped or not, and Heat gauges over 50% go down faster by accumulating style points.

Thus, Lady wants to swap weapons to keep as many as possible in the "sweet spot" of yellow heat, not using them too much to redline them or too little to cool down to uncharged blue heat. Because it is so easy to put out multiple "fully charged" attacks in a row, the effect of her charge is somewhat less impressive than Nero's. (It's really more like red is level 0.75, and yellow is level 1.5 charged attack.)

Lady has 4 ranged weapons, accessible from the D-pad.

KALINA ANN II: A rocket launcher. Works almost exactly like Dante's version, but higher level rockets have wider explosions with increased knockback, serve as launchers against the targeted enemy, and at level 3 stick to enemies to explode again. Kalina Ann II can still be charged and the effect of Heat multiplies the effectiveness of charge, but not by a huge amount. Generates heat quickly.

MARVIN & TAMMY: Twin machine pistols. Lady's version of Ebony and Ivory or Luce and Ombra. S firing targets one enemy, C firing targets multiple enemies (Twosome Time, Rainstorm, etc, but switching targets automatically). Holding down the button results in continuous fire that increases the heat gauge. The bullets can juggle airborne enemies, deal more damage and stun with Heat, and at level 3 bullets are incendiary, lighting enemies aflame for minor but stacking damage over time. Generate heat slowly.

DIANA: A weird laser crossbow thingy. A de-Deviled version of Artemis from DMC3. S fires a laser bolt. Holding S increases the lock-on targets, and firing against multiple lock-on targets increases the heat gauge by the same amount as shooting one. C shoots slow-moving energy orbs. Holding C detonates the orbs to deal more damage, and circle-C fires an Acid Rain storm from Lady and a much smaller one from each orb. Energy orbs deal damage on collision with enemies and continue to move through them, and normal Artemis shots fired THROUGH orbs deal greatly increased damage (and the seeking aspect tries to be lenient about routing through an orb before turning in midair). Higher charge levels increase the number of orbs out at once and the number of lock-ons. Orbs stay out when switching to another weapon and increase the damage of other shots that pass through, but not by as much. Generates heat at a medium rate.

TYPHOON: A massive .600 Nitro Express revolver. A smaller version of the Spiral anti-materiel rifle from DMC3. This huge revolver was designed for half-demons to use, and normal humans would shatter their wrists from firing once -- Lady uses a mechanical brace and holds it with both hands. S fires implosion rounds that stagger, break guards, and suck enemies into each other increasing effectiveness with heat level. C fires piercing rounds that penetrate right through enemies and ricochet around, and heat level increases the number of times this can happen. Each enemy pierced increases the damage of the next shot. Holding S or C puts Lady in a manual-aim mode like Tomboy + Blue Rose with a corresponding increase in power. Back + S or C "fans the hammer", spraying fire wildly, greatly increasing the heat gauge, and knocking Lady back. Forward + S or C is a slow-aiming shot to a weak point with greatly increased stagger and either a much wider implosion radius or a guaranteed extra ricochet. Can't be used in midair without Wire Snatch. Generates heat at a medium-high rate.

OVERDRIVE: Lady is a full-blooded human and does not have a Devil Trigger mode. Instead, she has an experimental cooling system that is activated by pressing L1 and governed by what is basically the same thing as the Devil Trigger gauge, expanded by Purple Orbs, refilled by White Orbs. During Overdrive mode, all of her weapons fire faster and all have the level 2 effect regardless of their heat gauge. When a weapon would overheat during Overdrive mode, it instead consumes some more of the Overdrive gauge.

EXPLOSIVE: Tapping L2 basically emulates the function of Lady's Devil Trigger replacement in DMC4SE, consuming bars of Overdrive to toss grenades in front of her. The longer the button is held, the more grenades are thrown, in a wider arc. The power of this move is toned WAY down from DMC4SE and now serves mostly as a "break away" measure. Lady can drop grenades at her feet to break out of grabs like Dante can do by activating DT or Nero can by activating Break Away, but it takes at least 3 bars that are consumed instantly to no other effect.

WIRE: Lady has a grappling wire like Nero's, on its own button instead of tied to Kalina Ann. Back + R2 on the ground against a movable enemy performs Wire Fling, where Lady anchors herself to the ground and and attempts to fling a grounded enemy upward or airborne enemy downward and smack it into another enemy without moving herself. R2 in any other circumstance does a Wire Snatch like Nero, but since Lady is lighter and doesn't have devil force, she always moves toward her target instead of bringing it toward her.

Pressing an attack button during the Wire Snatch flight performs a special aerial attack: Shotgun has her perform a point blank shot on impact. Kalina Ann II launches an explosive that detonates when she lands, blowing her away in a backflip. S with Marvin and Tammy slows her approach as she unloads into her target, while C has her twirl about and spray every enemy but her target with fire. Diana fires a batch of lock-on bolts into the target upon landing, firing more bolts the longer the Wire flight was, and then slides away a moderate distance. Typhoon has her arc over the target, fire straight down into them, creating a large implosion effect and landing a little bit away from the target on the other side. The damage increase for heat level on these attacks is greater than normal.

Ricochet from enemy to enemy, blasting them and flying off. Bunch them up with implosions then knock everything apart with explosions. Set everyone on fire so the enemies you aren't attacking still take damage. Dance around to make sure your Diana orbs are between you and your target. Keep swapping weapons to maintain as many as possible in the "sweet spot" of the heat gauge. If a boss gets sick of you sniping it, fling yourself into its face, shooting wildly and bouncing off, or just deliver punishing shotgun combos at close range.

#devil may cry #my fiction #sort of

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marginalgloss · 7 years ago

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a bitter bedtime

Emily Wilson’s translation is the first time I've read The Odyssey from start to finish. I've never really read or studied much in the way of the ancient classics, aside from the occasional foray into extracts from Aristotle and Plato as part of studying English Lit. In my case most of my prior knowledge of The Odyssey probably came from reading Ulysses. Joyce's novel is more generous with its interpretation of Homer than is commonly supposed, but in a strange way I think it helped, though trying to map one directly on to the other is mostly just an exercise in frustration. At any rate, I know very little about prior versions of The Odyssey in English.

Most of the time I was aware that I was entirely at sea in a foreign medium while reading this. It is not quite song, not quite poem, not quite play, not quite prose. Wilson has rendered it in iambic pentameter and in English it reads in beautifully. The language is plain, balanced, unfussy. It has a rhythm which feels deeply old, though I know it’s really only a version of an English style defined in a period so recent it would fit comfortably inside the age of this writing many times over. Something about it remains beyond all comprehension. Some of it is plain confusing: the layer upon layer of myth, legend, rumour; the complex patterns of referentiality and retelling.

Sometimes it’s austere and sometimes it feels like it could have been written yesterday. But the drama of it is very real. The things that worked have worked again throughout all literature and they work again for us now. The terror of lonely isolation; the fear of the small mortal man, at loose in an unsympathetic universe. The precious quality of trust, the gift of welcoming affection between strangers. The fun to be had at the expense of the cruel, and the cruel antics that come from manipulating the ones we love. The pathos of an old dog resting his eyes on his master one last time before he dies. All of this was written some eight hundred years before Christ. All of it is uncannily familiar.

Reading the translator's note — which is a wonderfully passionate piece of writing in itself — I was struck by Wilson's insistence on producing a translation which was proper, both in the sense of presenting the truth of the original text as far as possible without unnecessary embellishment; but also right, in an ethical sense. She's very precise, for example, in referring to characters as 'slaves' when they might once have been called ‘servants’. And she has written elsewhere about the many interpretations of a sequence so famous as the Sirens, and the myriad layers of gender bias that need to be recognised when approaching that passage. The resulting text feels never less than deliberate, thoughtful. And she doesn't shy away from depicting the immediate brutality in the story, even when this might affect the sympathies we hold for the characters.

This idea of ‘rightness’ — that an author or translator might have an immediate moral duty towards their audience — is perhaps the most modern thing about this translation. I found it easy to imagine earlier translators who might subordinate what is right or what is correct to what is beautiful, but Wilson puts this the other way round. There is no sense here of a writer who has tried to imagine themselves into the moral codes of another era by framing something awful as something righteous. A rose is a rose is a rose: a slave is a slave is a slave.

So perhaps art is no longer entirely for art's sake; some of it might be morally good or bad after all. That this translation has been so positively received is a sign perhaps that it's entirely fitting for our era, in which we seem to expect a higher moral standard from artists (or at least evidence of some moral standard). We don't want the author to be dead; we want them very much alive, and responsible for their texts. Ideally we want them to be good people as well.

It’s impressive. I find it hard to conceive of an alternative approach. I cannot imagine a hypothetical contrarian who could rest their translation on a different set of values. I wondered what a less well-behaved translation would look like; but I suppose we’ve seen dozens of them through the ages.

Still, I never had the sense, reading this, that this ethical imperative was overriding the aesthetics of the text. It's kind of the opposite: first we have the ethical choice, and what proceeds from that is aesthetic effects that might have unexpected resonance. Wilson has a remarkable talent for creating imagery that lingers in the mind as it might in a particularly affecting horror movie. There's so many wonderful scenes here but the one that haunts me as I write this is the ghastly picture of the slave women brutally hanged by Odysseus and Telemachus near the end of the story:

At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope  round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar,  stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground.  As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly  home to their nests, but someone sets a trap –  they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;  just so the girls, their heads all in a row,  were strung up with the noose around their necks  to make their death an agony. They gasped,  feet twitching for a while, but not for long.

But she doesn't loom in judgment over the text. The translator isn't here to tell the reader how to feel about what happens every time Odysseus does something reprehensible. It is just there, plainly.

#books #emily wilson #homer #the odyssey

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phantom-le6 · 4 years ago

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Episode Reviews - Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 (1 of 6)

Capitalising on my last day of a break from my novel-writing efforts, I’m getting a start on episode reviews for the third season for Star Trek: The Next Generation now, so as to tide you all over until next weekend.

Episode 1: Evolution

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise approaches the Kavis Alpha binary star system to perform an astrophysics experiment led by Dr Paul Stubbs, analysing the decay of neutronium as a result of a stellar explosion that occurs every 196 years and is due to occur in the next few hours. Stubbs plans to launch a probe, dubbed the Egg, to gather the data, a result of a lifetime's development. Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Dr Crusher has returned to her duties on the Enterprise after a tour of duty at Starfleet Medical.

As the expected time of the stellar explosion nears, the ship beings to malfunction, and the issue is traced to the computer core. Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher, who had been working on a project involving microscopic nanites, realizes that he may have inadvertently let two nanites from his experiments loose. The nanites were programmed to find ways to work together and may have evolved as a result. A scan of the computer core reveals that the nanites have replicated themselves and have taken up residence in the computer core. With the computer controls unreliable, the crew and Dr Stubbs attempt to see if they can remove the nanites from the core. However, Dr Stubbs shoots the core with a burst of gamma radiation, destroying a large number of the nanites. They retaliate by flooding the bridge with nitrogen dioxide, which the crew overrides.

Dr Stubbs is confined to quarters, but the nanites attempt further revenge by shocking him with electricity. Captain Picard prepares to flood the computer core with gamma radiation to remove the nanites completely, but the android Second Officer Lt. Commander Data establishes communication with the nanites and allows them to use his body to speak with Picard. Picard realizes that the nanites are self-aware and conscious and took Dr Stubbs' actions as hostile, but they want peace. Picard negotiates a deal to send the nanites to Kavis Alpha IV, designating it as their homeworld with Dr Stubbs’ assistance. The nanites agree and repair the damage to the computer core before they leave it. Dr Stubbs launches his probe on time and collects numerous volumes of data.

Review:

There are a few notable changes in the show’s line-up; Worf has gone up from a lower grade of lieutenant to a higher one while Geordi is now a Lieutenant Commander, putting him up to the same rank as Data. Gates McFadden is now back as Dr Beverley Crusher, and as a result the supposedly McCoy-esque Dr Poklaski character is gone, along with head writer Maurice Hurley, who is believed to have been behind Gates’ departure back at the end of season 1. Finally, the uniforms have undergone a change in design and material that was apparently requested by Patrick Stewart.

This episode is better than either of the previous two season openers TNG has offered up, though it’s not as good as it could be. Apparently when Michael Pillar took over as head writer early in this season, he insisted every episode focus primarily on one character and be about something. By that criteria, we get a focus of sorts in Wesley, and we get to see that not only is he struggling to measure up to all the demands placed on him as student and acting officer, but we also see something of what over-dedication could do to Wesley through the analogue of guest character Dr Stubbs. However, the nano-technology thread detracts from effective exploration of either issue.

To make this episode truly brilliant, I think they should have either built up to Wesley letting the nanites out in error more and focused on his struggling to juggle his responsibilities and his mother’s concerns about that, or they should have focused on creating more parallels between Wesley and Stubbs to be explored. In essence, this episode is evidence that Pillar’s approach was very much in its infancy at that point and was not well developed yet. However, it does improve down the line, and the closing scene in Ten-Forward between Beverley and Guinan is superb. Overall, I’d give this episode 8 out of 10.

Episode 2: The Ensigns of Commands

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise receives an automated message from the enigmatic Sheliak: Remove the humans on planet Tau Cygni V in four days. The Sheliak are a non-humanoid species with little regard for human life and would exterminate any humans found in their path. Their message is only due to their obligation under a treaty with the Federation to notify their intention to colonize before taking further action.

There is no record of a Federation colony ship being sent there as it contains levels of hyperonic radiation lethal to humans, which doesn't explain why the Sheliak indicate otherwise. The Enterprise arrives in the system to find what looks to be a small colony on the surface. The android Second Officer, Lt. Commander Data takes a shuttlecraft to the planet to coordinate the evacuation as he is the only crewmember unaffected by the radiation. Once he arrives, he finds that the sensor readings were incorrect. He is informed by locals Haritath and Kentor that it is a colony of 15,253 people, the descendants of the wayward colony ship Artemis launched 92 years prior. The colonists' ancestors found a means to survive within the radiation but initially suffered heavy loss of life before an effective defence was found.

Although it would normally be a simple matter of beaming the colonists off the planet, hyperonic radiation renders the transporters useless. Because of this, a complete evacuation of the planet would take an estimated three weeks as no dedicated transport ships are available until then, and the Sheliak are not willing to give the Federation any extra time beyond the three days required by the treaty.

After explaining the situation and being rebuffed by the colony's leader, Gosheven, Data is befriended by a sympathetic colonist named Ard'rian. She expresses interest in Data as an android and invites Data to her home, where they discuss ways to persuade the colonists to evacuate. To his puzzlement Ard'rian kisses Data. Data explains to the colonists that they should evacuate their world before its imminent destruction, pointing out by reverse psychology that the only result of their heroic hopeless last stand will be their total annihilation. Gosheven, however, refuses to leave and insists they will protect themselves by fighting, which many of the colonists agree with.

With time running out, Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew begin poring through the 500,000-word treaty in the hopes of finding something they can use to their advantage.

At a meeting at Ard'rian’s home, Data talks to several of the colonists who are thinking of leaving the doomed colony; Gosheven comes in and electrocutes Data. Data recovers and reasons that if persuasion cannot work, then intimidation through a show of force should be his next option. Modifying his phaser to work in the hyperonic atmosphere, he raids the colonists' aqueduct to prove they are helpless to defend their livelihood. When Data easily stuns the colonists guarding the aqueduct, he points out that if they can't defend against a single person with a phaser, then they aren't capable of fighting the hundreds of Sheliak, who would likely destroy them via orbital bombardment. Data then sends a phaser charge up the aqueduct system to vaporise the water that is vital to the colony's survival, convincing the colonists to evacuate the world. Gosheven reluctantly relents.

Back on the Enterprise, Picard exploits a loophole in the treaty. He invokes a section calling for third-party arbitration to resolve the dispute and names as arbitrators the Grizzelas, a species that is in its hibernation cycle for another six months. Picard offers the Sheliak a choice: wait six months for the Grizzelas to come out of hibernation, or give the Federation three weeks to evacuate the colony. Ultimately, the Sheliak give the Federation the three weeks.

Just as Data is about to leave the colony in his shuttle, Ard'rian comes to say goodbye. She asks Data if he has any feeling over what has just happened, and Data explains that he cannot experience feelings. To her surprise, He then kisses Ard'rian. She remarks that he "realized" she needed a kiss; Data leaves Ard'rian and returns to the Enterprise.

Aboard the Enterprise, Picard comments on Data's performance at a classical concert before his mission with the human colonists. Picard tells Data he performed with feeling, and Data reminds Picard that he has no feeling. Picard says that this is hard to believe, noting his fusion of two very different music styles in his performance suggests real creativity. At that, and in obvious reflection of his recent solution of the colony problem, Data concedes that he has become more creative when necessary.

Review:

It’s taken me reading through Memory Alpha’s notes on this episode to get any idea of what this episode’s title means. Apparently, it’s taken from a poem by John Quincey Adams and talks about ensigns as in flags or symbols rather than the officer rank used in TNG. However, this episode is focusing more on Data struggling with how to take command when his lack of emotion hinders him. That has nothing to do with flags or symbols, so for me the episode feels completely mis-labelled. I think the writers should have worked longer and harder to find a more literal title and not picked a random line from a bloody poem (I, for one, find poetry to be largely intolerable; just a bunch of bad song lyrics no one could be arsed to put to music in the vast majority of cases where I’m concerned).

That aside, this is a decent episode that does well to show Data having to cope in a situation a bit outside his comfort zone, while Picard and company do well to support the main story in their contributions to the episode. It’s also a good episode about not only the merits of playing on people’s emotions and actions often having more impact than words, not to mention the importance of putting lives above places and possessions in crisis situations. I also don’t much mind that Goshoven’s prejudice against Data isn’t better explored, since that would have just repeated ‘Measure of a Man’ from last season, and that wouldn’t add anything to the show as a whole, nor to this episode in particular. Overall, I give it 9 out of 10.

Episode 3: The Survivors

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise responds to a distress call from a Federation colony on Delta Rana IV and discovers the planet to be devastated and devoid of life, save for a patch of land containing a house and vegetation. Transporting to the surface, the away team meets the human occupants of the house, Kevin and Rishon Uxbridge, who claim to have witnessed the attack that destroyed the colony, but are unaware that they are the only survivors. The team, finding nothing of interest save for a small music box, insists that the Uxbridges return to the Enterprise for safety, but they refuse. Aboard the Enterprise, Counsellor Troi begins to hear the music from the music box in her mind constantly, each repetition slightly louder than the last, which eventually reduces her to screaming hysterics. Dr Crusher is forced to place her in an induced coma.

An unknown spacecraft appears and attacks the Enterprise, then flees. The Enterprise gives chase but is unable to overtake the spaceship; eventually Captain Picard orders the Enterprise to return to the planet. Picard transports to the surface personally; Kevin suggests they were spared because they are pacifists. Upon the away team's return, the spaceship appears in orbit again, this time delivering a far more powerful attack. Picard orders the Enterprise to leave the system first, but then begins to suspect that the crew is being toyed with.

Returning to the planet again, Picard transports to the surface to plead with the Uxbridges to leave with him. After being refused again, Picard tells them the Enterprise will remain to protect them as long as they live, and returns to the ship. The alien spaceship appears again and destroys the Uxbridges' home. Picard orders an attack on the craft, and unlike the previous encounters, easily destroys it. Playing on a suspicion, Picard has the Enterprise move to a higher orbit; after a short time, the Uxbridges' home reappears.

Picard orders the Uxbridges beamed up to the Enterprise and confronts Kevin with his suspicions: Kevin and Rishon's house was destroyed in the attack and Rishon was killed, but Kevin, who is not human, has recreated them both, and created the alien warship to dissuade the Enterprise from investigating. Kevin admits the truth, and the illusory Rishon disappears. He removes the torturous music that he had placed in Troi's mind to prevent her from telepathically identifying him.

Kevin reveals that he is a Douwd, an immortal energy being with vast powers, who fell in love with Rishon and settled with her on Rana IV. When the planet was attacked by an aggressive, destructive species called the Husnock, he refused to join the fight in accordance with his species' pacifism. Rishon, however, died defending the colony. Stricken with grief, Kevin lashed out with his vast powers and wiped out the entire Husnock species; over 50 billion. Horrified by his crime, he chose self-exile to the planet, creating the replicas of Rishon and their house to spend the rest of eternity. Picard states that they are not qualified to be his judges, having no laws to fit the magnitude of his crime. The Enterprise leaves Kevin and his illusion in peace, and Picard confirms he will issue a warning not to visit the planet. Picard later opines in his log that a being as powerful and conscientious as Kevin is best left alone.

Review:

This is an interesting mystery episode that seems to focus primarily on Picard, since he works out the mystery fairly quickly but then keeps the solution, or at least his part of it, unrevealed until much later. However, once again the idiocy of Roddenberry rears its head, as according to an episode commentary I watched on a later episode in this round, 24th century humans supposedly weren’t meant to get angry at anything in Roddenberry’s mind. This is a stupid idea that is totally unbelievable, and as a result no one objects to Picard’s apparent sacrifice of the Uxbridges. No one but Picard has apparently deduced they’re dealing with illusions of a kind, so surely someone should have questioned the captain’s actions.

This is a clear-cut example of why Roddenberry becoming less involved during this season and eventually leaving Trek was a fundamental necessity for the franchise’s long-term survival. To believe that humans, that any species, could ever lose such an integral and necessary emotion as anger, or that losing our anger is somehow a desirable evolutionary path, is simply idiotic. The fact that suppressing human emotion was the subject of a dystopian film like Equilibrium is also proof of this, as the dystopian emotion-suppressing regime is total collapse by that film’s end and rightly so.

However, there’s not much issue exploration in this episode. The mystery, when revealed, turns out to be Trek doing its own version of what Chris Claremont did in X-Men comics with the Dark Phoenix saga, but since the cosmically powered being going too far in moments of overwhelming need or emotion is just a guest character, it lacks the same sort of resonance. The bottom line is this episode shows that despite the quality of the season’s first two episodes, TNG had yet to fully abandon its errors of the first two seasons. I also absolutely loathed Troi’s hysteria performance and had to fast-forward it. On balance, I’d give this episode 5 out of 10.

Episode 4: Who Watches The Watchers

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise travels to the planet Mintaka III to resupply and repair a Federation outpost being used to monitor the Mintakan people, a proto-Vulcan race near a Bronze Age level of cultural development.

As the Enterprise nears the outpost, an accident causes the holographic rockface to disappear, exposing the outpost to Liko, a Mintakan. Liko attempts to approach and is hit with an electrical shock, which causes him to fall off the cliff and sustain critical injuries. When Chief Medical Officer Dr Crusher rushes to provide aid, she realizes the injuries are too severe to treat there and has him transported to the Enterprise for treatment despite the action violating the Prime Directive. Liko becomes conscious and witnesses everything occurring in Sick Bay, and focuses on Captain Picard giving instructions. Dr Crusher is able to heal Liko and attempts to wipe his memory of the incident before returning him to the planet. Commander Riker suggests that he and Counsellor Troi disguise themselves as Mintakans in order to search for Palmer, a missing member of the anthropological team, and to monitor Liko, to make sure the memory wipe worked. They discover to their horror that the mind wipe did not take, as Liko recalls an image of "the Picard", and has convinced other Mintakans that the Picard must be their god.

Troi and Riker subtly try to dispel the myth of the Picard, which gains traction until a hunting party arrives with a delirious Palmer in tow. While Troi provides a diversion, telling the clan that another "like Palmer" is heading for the caves, Riker ties up an elderly man who was left behind to keep an eye on Palmer, and Riker and Palmer run away, and narrowly escape back to the Enterprise. Unfortunately, Troi is captured and held captive for her hand in the escape, leaving Picard to take steps to rectify the situation without further violation of the Prime Directive.

Picard transports Nuria, the leader of the village where Troi is being held, to the Enterprise and attempts to show her that he and the rest of the crew are mortal, including having her witness the death of a member of the anthropological team in Sickbay. Picard returns with Nuria to the surface in the middle of a thunderstorm, which Liko has taken as a sign of the Picard's anger. Nuria attempts to rationalize with Liko, but Liko demands his own proof of Picard's mortality and aims an arrow at Picard. Picard insists that if that is the only proof that Liko will accept, then Liko should shoot. Liko does, but his daughter pushes him so that he only wounds Picard. Nuria shows Liko Picard's blood from the wound, and Liko and the others come to accept that Picard is not a god. Picard and Troi return to the Enterprise, and after he is treated, Picard returns to the surface one last time, and explains to the Mintakans that they will be removing the outpost and allowing them to develop on their own. Before Picard leaves, Nuria gives him a Mintakan tapestry as a gift.

Review:

This is our second Picard-centric episode on the run, and it’s much better in terms of both performance and issue exploration, not to mention emotional expression. Moreover, it’s another chance to explore and debate that classic Trek chestnut known as the Prime Directive, which this time is broken by accident when it would obviously have been better to avoid that situation, and thereafter the issue becomes how best to resolve it. As someone who thinks all religions are best treated as theories until proven or disproven by science (which in real life science cannot yet achieve), I enjoyed this because it honestly tries to look at the issue from both sides, albeit not for long.

The episode explores the idea of an advanced race appearing god-like to a less advanced civilisation, which in more recent times has been utilised to work Thor and the Asgardian race into Marvel’s film in a sci-fi way rather than as beings of mystic fantasy, and also points out the inherent flaw in all religions. Basically, once our guest aliens start believing in Picard as a god, they’re almost constantly trying to work out what do, and as Troi points out, “that’s the problem with believing in a supernatural being; trying to work out what he wants.” This is where all religions fall down, because by and large that supernatural being never appears, never communicates directly, so you have no reliable, impartial means by which to determine if what ‘God’, ‘Allah’, ‘Zeus’, ‘Odin’ or whoever wants you to do has or hasn’t been done.

The guest character of Dr Barron even suggests that to minimise the damage caused by the Prime Directive being violated, Picard actually step into that supernatural being role and impose commandments so that the potential religion goes in a positive direction, but Picard shoots the idea down. He sees the abandoning of religion as an achievement, and to a degree I see his point of view. A lot of our history’s worst moments have been born out of misinterpreting or misusing religion as an excuse for wars, bigotry, inquisitions, etc. and that’s even when there are commandments built into a religion. The reality is that while religion can have its positive elements, it is ultimately through secular morality that isn’t based on abstract that a society is more likely to progress and thrive.

For me, this is a great episode and another example of Trek at its finest. I give it top marks because it really doesn’t put a foot wrong; 10 out of 10.

Episode 5: The Bonding

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

While investigating a planet once occupied by Koinonians, Lt. Worf and members of the Enterprise away team trigger an ancient mine. They are transported to Sickbay, but Lieutenant Marla Aster is dead. As Captain Picard delivers the news of Marla's death to her son Jeremy, Wesley Crusher talks with Commander Riker about how Picard had delivered the news of his father's death to his mother and himself. Worf expresses his desire to make R'uustai, a Klingon bonding ritual with Jeremy, as they are both orphans and he believes he can help the boy recover emotionally, but Counsellor Troi warns that Jeremy may react badly if Worf makes such an offer too soon.

The crew investigates the planet, discovering mines that were recently unearthed and exposed. They observe a beam of charged particles emanating from the surface headed towards the Enterprise, while Troi senses a new presence from the planet. In Jeremy's quarters, a physical manifestation of Marla appears, explaining that the crew mistakenly considered her dead and that she wants Jeremy to live on the planet. Worf and security officers follow the two, preventing "Marla" from using the transporter to return to the planet, and Troi and Picard also intervene. Troi and Jeremy return to the Aster family quarters, which has the appearance of the Asters' home on Earth. Chief Engineer La Forge tunes the shields to stop the particle beam, causing "Marla" to disappear and the room returns to normal.

A filament rises from the planet, striking the Enterprise and disrupting the shields; "Marla" appears and takes Jeremy, intent on going to the transporter room. Picard contains "Marla" with force fields and talks to her. "Marla" explains that she is one of two races that once lived on the planet; her species, made from energy, watched the other physical species wipe themselves out from wars and her people want to prevent more suffering caused by the remnants of the war, thus providing Jeremy with the illusion of his mother still being alive. Picard and Troi point out that dealing with death is part of the human condition. Wesley explains to Jeremy how he dealt with his father's death, explaining he was initially angry with Picard for living while his father died. Jeremy expresses his own anger at Worf, but Troi points out they are both orphans, while Worf notes that he was aided by humans after he lost his parents. Jeremy decides to go with Worf. Realizing that Jeremy will be all right, the illusion of Marla disappears and the alien presence is no more.

Sometime later, Worf and Jeremy undertake the R'uustai ritual.

Review:

This is the episode I was talking about earlier where I checked out the commentary and discovered yet more example of how idiotic some of Roddenberry’s idealism got. The episode is very much centred around the necessity of grieving for those we lose to death and how we go through that, and Roddenberry apparently didn’t want the affected child in this episode getting angry, part of which was down to this idea that 24th century humans just don’t get angry. The other part was that he thought the humans of this time period would be taught to accept death from an early age, and as such there would be no inter-personal conflict as a result of someone losing anyone close to them.

Frankly, that’s about the most inhuman concept I could imagine, because having experienced the loss of all my grandparents to various causes, most of which allowed for some preparation time, I can attest to this being the worst idea imaginable. Nothing is ever going to prepare you to lose someone close to you, and no amount of time or human advancement will ever make accepting death any easier. Luckily, the re-writes on the show’s original script nicely bypass Roddenberry’s filters and keep the natural emotions of grieving in there; they just lay beneath the surface of most of the affected characters because everyone’s basically repressing them, and there’s a kind of gentle catharsis for everyone in the final act.

It’s also an episode where I feel the intended and actual focus of the story are different. This was apparently meant to be a Worf story, but so much focus is put on the guest characters, not to mention Troi, Picard and Wesley, that it doesn’t really seem like Worf ends up really being the true focal point at all. However, it’s interesting to see how all these characters make worthwhile contributions to the subject at hand. Wesley and Worf have both been through the same kind of thing Jeremy has experienced, Troi is brilliant acting as counsellor and helping everyone out (this is how she should be in more of her own episodes), and then you’ve got Picard not only struggling with this terrible duty, but also with the question of ‘why do we let families on this ship?’

The last point is one that I think many people will find puzzling about TNG’s Enterprise; it’s a Federation ship, the Starfleet flagship at that, and we’ve seen by now how much danger it can encounter. As such, Picard has the right idea in noting how dubious a decision it is to have families, to have children and non-Starfleet adults, aboard a ship of exploration when it’s constantly risking the unknown and the potential perils that lurk therein. It’s notable that later shows, and even all TNG films after Generations, removed the family ship concept. We also get Data making some quite relevant queries and observations in a scene with Riker, so almost all the crew get their moment to comment, with only Geordi missing out from the main cast in terms of the focal issue.

However, overall, it’s a brilliant episode, and a great testament to the wisdom of Michael Piller. Another thing he did as head writer was to open the door to spec scripts, which were scripts submitted by the general public. This enabled Trek fans and unestablished writers to make contributions and, in some cases, to get on the Trek shows. Melissa Snodgrass’ script for ‘Measure of a Man’ was an early example of a spec script being used, and this one came courtesy of Ronald D. Moore, who ended up becoming a staff writer on the Trek shows for a decade after a few spec script successes. If you can get this quality of Trek by taking on unsolicited fan scripts rather than using established TV writers who have little understanding of the franchise, then I think a lot of other franchises need to tap their fan-base in the same way. All in all, I give this episode 10 out of 10.

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cicadacreativemag · 4 years ago

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Proctoring software is a nightmare for students. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Jay Serrano, Editorial Director

As you all know: COVID. In response to the lack of in-person interaction, many colleges and universities have begun to use proprietary software to ensure students do not cheat during exams, most often ProctorU, Proctorio, and ExamSoft. I take 3 issues with this development:

1.) This is spyware.

When you require students to install software that quite literally watches them, that is spyware.

“Spyware describes software with malicious behavior that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send such information to another entity in a way that harms the user; for example by violating their privacy or endangering their device's security.” (Wikipedia)

Modern tech’s propensity for obsessive surveillance has become increasingly difficult to combat and virtually impossible to avoid. However, one would hope higher institutions would advocate for things like data privacy and personal agency. Instead, the director of academic testing services at Utah State University lightheartedly described Proctorio as “sort of like spyware that we just legitimize.” (Washington Post) The University of Arizona’s assistant director of technology insisted students don’t mind because “they know this is an expectation because their professors put it out there.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the student body says otherwise. (The Verge) Additionally, the chief executive of Proctorio reflected on the situation with a dystopian, “we’re the police.” (Washington Post)

I could spiral into a separate tangent about how the US obsession with policing and instinct to punish accelerates the meritocratic rot of late stage capitalism under collaborative neoliberal and fascist rule, but suffice to say that no academic software should ever be comparing itself to law enforcement. That’s how dystopian horror movies start. Putting aside this horrendously inappropriate take, violating student privacy is a pattern—schools force us to engage with abusive proprietary software every day. Whether it’s opting us into a relationship with Google via school Gmail accounts, forcing students to have accounts with Adobe Creative Cloud as a requisite for even being able to engage with a course, or holding office hours via Microsoft Teams, there is an insidious drip of our data that is all being funneled through people who want to profit from it. All of these companies have been revealed to be astonishingly abusive with data. Google alone would take an entire new post to cover (4 lawsuits and counting).

I don’t expect universities to be a beacon of free and open-source software, especially given how frankly inconvenient most FOSS is. But I also don’t expect them to gleefully make it worse. Proctor software requires a webcam to view (and, usually, tour) a student’s living space and often uses biometrics to track their physical motion; it often features facial recognition and eye tracking. It also records the event and human proctors may be able to remotely control the student’s machine. (Washington Post) It seems almost absurd to have to explain the Orwellian nature of this type of surveillance, but in case this wasn’t clear: allowing for-profit companies to record and monitor students in their private living spaces because they might look up a Calculus formula is absolutely unhinged.

2.) It isn’t an effective measure for cheating and does not account for students with disabilities or, really, the majority of people.

One of the most infamous features of this type of software is that it tracks eye movement and physical motion. These are, perhaps, pretty easy behaviors to latch onto as signs of academic dishonesty. But, as is often the case, the easiest path is also the laziest and least thoughtful. The assumption that darting eyes and excessive motion are indicators of dishonesty is a lazy one that perpetuates ableist beliefs and assumptions. Students with ADHD may have a difficult time sitting still or staring directly at the monitor. Students with anxiety may need periods of time to readjust, perhaps closing their eyes to re-center. A student on the autism spectrum may need to stim during an exam. Students with chronic pain and/or fatigue may need to take breaks to stretch or struggle with uncomfortable seating (hi, that’s me.) As one student reported, she struggles with tics, particularly in stressful situations (such as exams), which puts her in a situation where she is being recorded in a vulnerable moment as she struggles with her disability, which she describes as embarrassing.

Even neurotypical students often fidget (clicking a pen, shaking a leg, etc.) It’s a very normal response to stress and hyper-concentration. Several peer-reviewed studies indicate that motion can be an effective tool to aid memory retrieval and clearer cognition. There is no reason to flag this as a suspicious or negative behavior, either in person or virtually. The only reason to discourage this behavior is for their benefit--it is much easier to identify any behavior other than the strictly prescribed one than it is to actually prioritize all students’ learning. Conventional academic settings are notoriously unfriendly to neurodivergent students and are often directly detrimental to the professed goals of teaching and learning. This is very much an institutional problem. It is just even more glaring and naked when distilled in this way--when given the choice between letting students learn comfortably (requiring some recalibration of course material) and forcing disabled students to be recorded by a software that is trained to view them as inherently suspicious, universities chose the latter.

To refocus and summarize: This software strips students of effective coping tools to take a test and hinders their academic performance.

So far, we’ve identified two ways this software works to the detriment of students and have identified zero ways it works to our benefit. At this point, we must ask: “Who does this serve?”

3.) This is a byproduct of institutional laziness that does not value its undergraduate students.

We have access to all the information we could ever need to perform our tasks competently, rendering many old testing styles archaic and impractical. Of course, we should have some working knowledge, but most of us will not be in situations where we have 2 minutes to recall the types of fault lines of the North American plate.

It demonstrates a broader issue: universities take their undergraduate students for granted; they fleece us for money we don’t have under the pretense that good education costs good money, then refuse to intervene when they do not deliver on that promise. We’re forced to spend inordinate amounts of money on textbooks—an 88% increase between 2006 and 2016 (Vox)—and additional equipment like clickers (which are usually just used to take attendance). We have little recourse when our professors (especially tenured professors) implement abusive practices. But we make these institutions run. Without undergraduate students, every single one of these universities would go under. The institutional arrogance and entitlement seems to grow every day, becoming harder and harder to ignore. But we--and more importantly, they--know college is the single most important tool for upward class mobility. As the casualties of late stage capitalism’s death rattle, we have no choice. It’s why they do it--they know they’ll get away with it. They know we have nowhere else to go.

In this specific context, I understand the burden of reconfiguring a course is not an easy one to shoulder and I do not expect professors to suddenly have all the answers. However, by introducing this software, the professor shifts this burden to this student--again. It is not our burden to bear--again. We’re struggling as well—there is no need to make it worse.

Where do we go from here?

Some of my fellow Cicadas pointed out I left this on a fairly depressing note. Although I am determinedly cynical, I don’t think there’s any harm in sharing some ideas.

Proctoring software is generally used for summative assessments, which evaluates student learning at a given benchmark, like a midterm or a final exam. These are high stakes, which means there is a high incentive to cheat, hence the proctors. Formative assessments are lower stakes, things like a quick summary of a lecture or a mini-quiz. Formative assessments aid learning and summative assessments measure learning. Conventional wisdom says both are necessary. A trickle of research has indicated that this may not be the case and this teacher makes a very compelling case as for why summative assessments might not even be necessary anymore.

That in mind, the most logical way to resolve this proctoring issue would be to eliminate time-based, closed note summative tests. There are many ways to achieve this

Solution #1: More (formative) testing.

I think almost everyone can identify with the “cramming for a test” experience. You sit down at 11:00 PM to engage with the material for the first time before your 8:00 AM exam. If you’re like me, maybe you’re only just now reading the textbook (oops). You open Quizlet and stare at the screen till your eyes hurt. Is it too late to email the professor a clarification question? You sleep for 3 hours, remorsefully wobbling your way through the test as you desperately chug the dregs of your coffee. You leave the room and feel overwhelming relief. You pass the test and learn almost nothing.

Henry L. Roediger III, a famous cognitive psychologist known for his research on memory, asserts the following: fast learning leads to fast forgetting. Cramming is popular because it works. At least, long enough to get through the test. His study reveals that self-testing is an incredibly effective tool for learning, but that it is not leveraged in a productive way. He elaborates on a concept known as the “testing effect” and studies better testing practices, all of which you can find here.

Basically, he asserts that one day of intense formative assessments was so effective for learning that it enabled the student to survive a summative assessment. In other words, many times, a cramming situation occurs because the formative assessments either did not happen or they were not effective,

How to implement/Examples:

Quizzes can be embedded into lecture videos using Canvas. Every lecture could be split into multiple videos, each one with graded, embedded quizzes.

This could be a weekly quiz that goes over lecture material. Maybe this quiz has 2-3 attempts and records the highest score.

Solution #2: No memory-based testing.

If summative exams are really necessary, there are other ways to measure mastery of the material. One could argue that assessments such as recitals and other performances require a component of memory, but generally, performance-based summative assessments are an accumulation of all you’ve learned and retain the pressure of a traditional exam without requiring a proctor.

Have you ever taken notes so desperately you didn’t actually absorb what was said? Have you ever just listened to a lecture and been surprised at how much you absorbed? Our fear of not remembering something we’ll need on an exam can be extremely distracting. However, if you can focus on the lecture completely without being distracted, you can have a more meaningful recollection of the material. Maybe you don’t remember Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, but you do remember that it was published in a serialization for 12 months in the 1800s.

How to implement/Examples:

Essays take the place of traditional exams. Instead of a time-based hunt through the treasure trove of young adult memory, a student can take their time to sort through the information they’ve been presented and create a unique response. This does, of course, have its own host of challenges and should be treated carefully, but essays could just as easily measure mastery.

Perhaps a class could be conducted almost entirely through discussions and direct engagement. After every single lecture, you post a summary of what you learned with 3 questions. This is a type of formative testing that could replace mini-quizzes and other memory based assessments.

#jay

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