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snarktheater · 4 years ago

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Hey, d'you have any French book recs? I'm trying to work on my French, and rn I have downloaded one of my favourite book series' French translations, but I figured maybe books already written in French might work better? Also have you read the Ranger's Apprentice series? 1/2

RA's def flawed - the books' narration does like to point bright arrows at the protagonists' intelligence, and the last few books def have the tone of 'old white man trying to write feminism', although at least he's trying? - and it's aimed more to the younger side of YA, but it is still a very fun series, and I can ignore the flaws fairly easily, at least partly due to nostalgia? This rather long lol but I'm wordy.

I'll start with the second question: no, although every time the series is brought up I have to check the French title and go "oh, right, I've seen these books in stores". But I've never purchased or read them. It sounds like something I probably would have enjoyed as a teen but I just missed the mark, and these days I'm trying to drown myself in queer books, so that probably isn't happening.

As for your first question, geez, I haven’t read a French book in years, so this is gonna skew middle grade/YA, though that may not be so bad if the point is to learn the language. I will also say that as a result, these may read a little outdated.

I'll put it under a cut, even if Tumblr has become really bad with correctly displaying read mores. Sorry, mobile crowd.

It's also likely that old readers of the blog will have seen me talk about most of these. I don't feel like going through old posts.

One last thing: while I was curating this list I took the time to make a Goodreads shelf to keep track of those.

The Ewilan books by Pierre Bottero

(It's a testament to how long ago I read these books that these are not the covers of the edition I own, and I can't even find those on Google. I'm settling for a more recent cover anyway since it'll make it easier to find them, presumably)

There are at least three trilogies (that I know of) set in the same world.

The first trilogy is essentially an isekai (so, French girl lands in parallel fantasy world by accident) with elements of chosen one trope, though I find the execution makes it worth the while anyway.

The second trilogy is a direct sequel, so same protagonist but new threat, and the world gets expanded.

The third one is centered around a supporting characters from the previous books, and the first couple of books in it are more her backstory than a continuation, though the third one concludes both that trilogy and advances the story of the other books as well.

Notably these books have a really fun magic system where the characters "draw" things into existence. It's just stuck with me for some reason.

A bunch of stuff by Erik L'Homme

I have read a lot of this man's books, starting with Le Livre des Etoiles.

They also skew towards the young end of YA, arguably middle grade, I never bothered to figure out where to draw the line. They're coincidentally also using the premise of a parallel world to our own (and yes, connected to France again, the French are just as susceptible of writing about their homeland), but interestingly are set from the point of view of characters native to the parallel world.

It also has a very unique magic system, this one based on a mix of a runic alphabet and sort-of poetry. I'll also say specifically for these books that the characters stuck with me way more than others on this list, which is worth mentioning.

This trilogy is my favorite by Erik L'Homme, but I'll also mention Les Maîtres des brisants, which is a fantasy space opera with a pirate steampunk(?) vibe. I think it's steampunk. I could be mistaken. But it's in that vein. It's also middle grade, in my opinion not as good, but it could just be that it came out when I was older.

Another one is Phaenomen, which was a deliberate attempt at skewing older (though still YA). This one is set in our (then-)modern world and centers a group of teens who happen to have supernatural powers. I guess the best way to describe it is a superhero thriller? If you take "superhero" in the sense of "people with individualized powers", since they don't really do a lot of heroing.

...I really need to brush up on genre terminology, don't I.

The Ji series by Pierre Grimbert

This one is actually adult fantasy, though it definitely falls under "probably outdated". It is very straight, for starters, and I'd have to give it another read to give a more critical reading of how it handles race (it attempts to do it, and is well meaning, but I'm not sure it survives the test of time & scrutiny, basically).

If I haven't lost you already, the premise is this: a few generations ago, a weird man named Nol gathered emissaries from each nation of the world and took them to a trip to the titular Ji island. Nobody knows what went down here, but now in the present day, someone is trying to kill off all descendants from those emissaries, who are as a result forced to team up and figure out what's going on.

I'm not going to spoil past that, though I will say it has (surprise) a really unique magic system! I guess you can start to piece together what my younger self was interested in. Which, admittedly, I still am.

Once again, this one also has a strong cast of characters, helped by rich world building and the premise forcing the characters to come from many different cultures (though, again, I can't vouch for the handling of race because it's been too long).

The first series is complete by itself, though it has two sequel series as well, each focusing on the next generation in these families. Because yes, of course they all pair up and have kids. Like I said: very straight.

A whole lot of books by Jean-Louis Fetjaine

OFetjaine is a historian, and I guess he's really interested in Arthurian mythos especially, because he loves it so much he's written two separate high fantasy retellings of them! I'm not criticizing, mind you, we all need a hobby.

The former, the Elves trilogy (pictures above) is very traditional high fantasy. Elves, dwarves, orcs, a world which is definitely fictionalized with a pan-Celtic vibe to it. The holy grail and excalibur are around, but they're relics possessed by the elves and dwarves with very different powers than usual. Et cetera.

Fetjaine also really loves his elves (as the titles might imply), and while they're not exactly Tolkien elves, there's a similar vibe to them. If you like Tolkien and his elf boner, you'll probably like this too. And conversely, if that turns you off, these books probably also won't work for you.

This series also has a prequel trilogy, centered around the backstory of one of the main characters. I...honestly don't remember too much about it, but I liked it, so, there you go, I guess.

I said Fetjaine did it twice. The other series is the Merlin duology, which, as the title implies, is a retelling of Merlin's story. Note that Merlin is also in the other trilogy, but it's a different Merlin; like I said, completely different continuities and stories.

This one is historical fantasy, so it's set in actual Great Britain, and Fetjaine attempts to connect Arthur to a "real" historical figure...but, you know, Merlin is also half-elf and elves totally exist in Brocéliande, so, you know. History.

Okay, that's probably enough fantasy, let me give some classics too.

L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires - Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber is a pretty seminal author of French sci-fi and I should probably be embarrassed that the only book of his that I read was for school, but, it is a really good one, so I'll include it anyway.

It's a novella collection, and when I say "sci-fi" I want to make it clear that it's very old school science fiction. It's more Frankenstein or Black Mirror than Star Trek, what we in French call the anticipation genre of science fiction: you take one piece of technology or cultural norm and project it into the future.

It has a pretty wide range of topics and tones, so it's bound to have some better than others. My personal faves were Du pain et des jeux, where football (non-American) has evolved into basically a wargame, and Tel maître, tel lion, where any animal is considered acceptable as a pet, no matter how absurd it is to keep as a pet. They're both on a comedic end, but there's more heartfelt stuff too.

L'Ecume des Jours - Boris Vian

(no cover because I can't find the one I have, and the ones I find are ugly)

This book is surrealist. Like, literally a part of the surrealist movement. It features things such as a lilypad growing inside a woman's lungs (and, as you well know, lilypads double in size every day, wink wink), the protagonist's apartment becoming larger and smaller to go with his mood and current financial situation, and more that I can't even recall at the moment because remembering this book is like trying to remember having an aneurysm.

It is also really, really fun and touching. Oh, and it has a pretty solid movie adaptation, starring Audrey Tautou, who I think an international audience would probably recognize from Amelie or the Da Vinci Code movie.

I don't really know what else to say. It's a really cool read!

Le Roi se meurt - Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco is somewhat famous worldwide so I wasn't even sure to include him here. He's a playwright who wrote in the "Theater of the Absurd" movement, and this play is part of that.

The premise of this play is that the King (of an unnamed land) is dying, and the land is dying with him. I don't really know what else to say. It's theater of the absurd. It kind of has to be experienced (the published version works fine, btw, no need to track down an actual performance, in my humble opinion).

The Plague - Albert Camus

You've probably heard of this one, and if you haven't, let me tell you about a guy called Carlos Maza

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I'm honestly more including this book out of a sense of duty. The other three are books I genuinely liked and happen to be classics. This book was an awful read. But, um. It's kind of relevant now in a way it wasn't (or didn't feel, anyway) back in 2008 or 2009, when I read it. And I don't just mean because of our own plague, since Camus's plague is pretty famously an allegory for fascism, which my teenage self sneered at, and my adult self really regrets every feeling that way.

Okay, finally, some more lighthearted stuff, we gotta talk about the Belgian and French art of bande dessinée. How is it different from comic books or manga? Functionally, it isn't. It really comes down more to what gets published in the Belgian-French industry compared to the American comics industry, which is dominated by superheroes, or the Japanese manga industry, which, while I'm less familiar with it, I know has some big genre trends as well that are completely separate.

The Lanfeust series - Arleston and Tarquin

This is a YA mega-series, and I can't recommend all of it because I've lost track of the franchise's growth. Also note that I say "YA", but in this case it means something very different from an American understanding of YA. These books are pretty full of sex.

No, when I say YA I mean it has that level of maturity, for better or worse. The original series (Lanfeust de Troy) is high fantasy in a world where everyone has an individual magical ability but two characters find out they're gifted with an absolute power to make anything happen, and while it gets dark at times, it's still very lighthearted throughout, and the humor is...well, I think it's best described as teen boy humor. And it has a tendency to objectify its female characters, as you'll quickly parse out from the one cover I used here or if you browse more covers.

But still, it holds a special place in my heart, I guess. And on my shelves.

The sequel series, Lanfeust des Etoiles, turns it into a space opera, and goes a little overboard with the pop culture reference at times, though overall still maintains that balance of serious/at times dark story and lighthearted comedy.

After that the franchise is utter chaos to me, and I've lost track. I know there was another sequel series, which I dropped partway through, and a spinoff that retold part of the original series from the PoV of the main love interest (in the period of time she spent away from the main group). There was a comedy spin-off about the troll species unique to this world, a prequel series, probably more I don't even know exist.

Les Démons d'Alexia

Something I can probably be a little less ashamed of including here.

Some backstory here. The Editions Dupuis are a giant of the Belgian bande dessinée industry, and for many, many years I was subscribed to their weekly magazine. That magazine was (mostly) made up of excerpts from the various books that the éditions were publishing at the time; those that were made of comic strips would usually get a couple pages of individual scripts, while the ongoing narratives got cut into episodes that were a few pages long (out of a typical 48 page count for a single BD album). Among those were this series.

For the first few volumes, I wasn't super into this series, probably because I was a little too young and smack dab in the middle of my "trying to be one of the boys" phase. But around book 3 I got really invested, to the point where I own the second half of the series because I had canceled by subscription by then but still wanted to know more.

Alexia is an exorcist with unusual talents, but little control, who's introduced to a group that specializes in researching paranormal phenomena, solving cases that involve the paranormal, that kinda stuff.

As a result of the premise, the series has a pretty slow start since it has to build up mystery around the source of Alexia's powers, but once it gets going and we get to what is essentially the series' main conflict, it gets really interesting.

Plus, witches. I'm a simple gay who likes strong protagonists and witches.

Murena

There was a point where my mtyhology nerdery led me to look for more stuff about the historical cultures that created them, and so I'd be super into stuff set in ancient Rome (I'd say "or Greece or Egypt" but let's face it, it was almost always Rome).

Murena is a series set just before the start of Emperor Nero's rule. You know, the one who was emperor when Rome burned, and according to urban legend either caused the fire or played the fiddle while it did (note: "fiddle" is a very English saying, it's usually the lyre in other languages). He probably didn't, it probably was propaganda, but he was a) a Roman Emperor, none of whom were particularly stellar guys and b) mean to Christians, who eventually got to rewrite history. So he's got a bad rep.

The series goes for a very historical take on events, albeit fictionalized (the protagonist and main PoV, the titular Lucius Murena, is himself fictional) and attempts to humanize the people involved in those events. Each book also includes some of the sources used to justify how events and characters are depicted, which is a nice touch.

It's also divided in subseries called "cycles" (books 1-4, 5-8 and the ongoing one starts at 9). I stopped after 9, though I think it's mostly a case of not going to bookstores often anymore. Plus it took four years between 9 and 10, and again between 10 and 11. But the first eight books made for a pretty solid story that honestly felt somewhat concluded as is, so it's a good place to start.

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xellandria · 4 years ago

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Zmija Yilan was a temporary character I played towards the end of our Tomb of Annihilation campaign after my boy Alexus got petrified by a beholder somewhere deep in the bowels of the tomb itself. We were able to “salvage” both him and Amara (who had also gotten petrified in the same fight) by shoving them into the Bag of Holding, but short of having the two of us sit on the bench while the remaining two party members waddled back to town, we had to roll some new characters.

I spent most of the week between the petrification and the new characters appearing being mad at myself for not remembering I had Inspiration I could have used to reroll either of my failed dex saves and not being able to do much beyond that, but with less than 72 hours left until she had to debut, I finally pulled an idea out of my butt, ran it by the DM because it involved Shenanigans™, got the OK and started designing her. Thus was born Zmija Yilan, whose appearance was based partly on an old photo that was semi-viral on Tumblr several years prior and partly on Xelloss from Slayers because when I’m in a pinch, that’s always who I fall back on, and have been doing so for like, 20+ years at this point lmao. Personality-wise, there was a post floating around Tumblr that week about proverbs in various languages that, when translated literally or without context, made very little sense so she got a lot of that (and associated misunderstandings based on language mix-ups) mixed in with—again—Xelloss from Slayers, because I am a hack. I would probably never play her again because she was so firmly entrenched in that campaign and also there’s some parts of how I designed/played her that I look back on and am like “ehhh I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the optics of this,” but I enjoyed playing her a lot more than I expected, and I look back on the end of our Tomb campaign very fondly because of it.

I haven’t been able to talk about her in public both for a lack of reason to do so and because I didn’t want to “spoil” my group in case they found my various social media posts, but as it’s nearly a year since she was introduced and nine months since the campaign ended, I’m gonna absolutely wall of text the shit outta this bitch, rofl (that said there’s baby’s first nekkid pin-up under here so assuming Tumblr lets me actually post it, fair warning for that under the cut)

Zmija Yilan - level 8-10 Human* Warlock (Great Old Ones/Pact of the Tome) (usually this is where my D&D character posts put stats but I don’t actually have access to her character sheet anymore, so let’s just pretend she had something ridiculous like maxed Charisma because I remember my spell DC being ridiculously high)

Zmija Yilan is a traveler from the far-off land of Zemlya, and a disciple of Matrymriy, one of the "family" of five gods in the pantheon of that region. Matrymriy came to Zmija in a dream one night and told her to travel across the seas because She had a task for her, and that she would learn more once she reached her destination. She's been traveling around Faerun for seven or so years—reaching one place, being given hints to go to a specific location, and upon reaching it, being told to travel on without seeming to do much more than just Be There. Upon reaching Chult sometime within the last few months, her patron's hints indicated that she should travel to a place called Shilku Bay; she hired a guide (named Salida) and a bodyguard (a Fort Belurian mook) with what little locally-acceptable currency she had; they got separated after being attacked by a band of undead, and after failing to reunite with them, she was wandering around lost, trusting that Matrymriy will guide her where She desires her to go.

Part of her wandering had her end up in the Tomb of the Nine Gods itself, where she encountered our adventuring party (down two player characters) desperately trying to find their way out of the tomb in the hopes of returning to Port Nyanzaru to depetrify their friends. Our barbarian’s player immediately distrusted her because I’d drawn her tabletop token with her back to the camera, which was an awkward feeling almost immediately returned in-game because both the barbarian and paladin aren’t hardcore RPers but they had to carry all the RP weight as they were introduced to this new character and explain that they were there to destroy a lich (both because it was the source of all the bad undead in the area, and because they’d been promised a reward—a motivation Zmija understood, as “a hungry bear will not dance.”) Beyond the usual RP awkwardness there was an additional layer of awkwardness between the characters IC as at the time, Thokk was barely wearing more than a breastplate and loincloth, while Zmija was covered neck-to-ankle despite the heat and humidity of the region. She claimed that in the culture of Zemlya, having strangers see your skin was a mark of great shame and that modesty was of paramount importance, so seeing so much of him was very off-putting and threw her off-balance for much of their initial interactions.

Getting off on the “wrong” foot with the party and pushing as hard as I could into Zmija’s quirks (the weird proverbs, sprinkling in her Zemlyan vocabulary and making a point of her being from Very Far Away with Very Different Customs) meant I went a little too hard on them at the beginning, which is partly what I’d do differently and partly why the whole thing ended up working, so it’s a weird retrospective balance. If my partymates had ever shoved (almost) any of the names or places Zmija mentioned into google, they probably would have twigged to the scheme pretty dang fast.

In reality, Zmija is not a human traveler from Zemlya, because surprise! she's actually Zsaksatyi, a Chultian Yuan-Ti Pureblood under the command of Fenthaza. She worked as a bit of a double agent/interrogator within the Fane prior to her current assignment (hence her spell list's focus on information gathering, silent communication, and manipulation); she's been fleshing out her alternate persona for years and would occasionally pretend to be a captive and be thrown in one of those cells the party was in to get relevant information from the other prisoners, or assist others that were interrogating prisoners by more direct means (via Detect Thoughts). In-universe, the language she pretends to speak is mostly made up, and something she's been working on for years at this point—it's not a fully-fleshed conlang and she only has a couple hundred words and phrases but it's enough to be consistent and believable when she sprinkles it into regular speech. Since there's no real risk of running into anyone else from Zemlya (because it doesn't actually exist), it mostly didn't matter, and since there's actual meaning behind the words she does have, in theory it would have held up to a spell like Comprehend Languages as well. Out of universe, the language she speaks is an amalgamation of my own conlang stuff (which, like the in-universe version, is very limited and not complete) and various words and phrases pulled mostly from real-world Slavic languages (russian, croatian, hungarian, etc) with a little bit of Turkish thrown in when my English-only ear felt that it fit or when I had already used a word and needed another word for the same thing. Zsaksatyi (pronounced dzahk sot-YEE) is the only name/word in the whole mess that doesn’t actually mean something somewhere, and was a combination of syllables from an online Yuan-Ti name generator that I kinda liked together. If she had ever been outed, I would probably have come up with something a little less cumbersome for me and my (almost certainly wholly monolingual) D&D group to say... but she didn’t, so Zsaksatyi it stays!

She very much looks up to Fenthaza and almost idolizes and worships her—if she ever had to choose between Fenthaza or Dendar, things might have gotten a little bit rough for her (possibly no matter which way she ultimately jumped, though I imagine Dendar's vengeance would be more immediate, if Dendar's a hands-on sort of patron). Thankfully (for her), there was very little risk of that given that the party had left Fenthaza on reasonably neutral terms (having already helped her oust Ras Nsi from his position of power in the Fane and the party having essentially marked that dungeon as “cleared”). Fenthaza had sent her to scout the Tomb of the Nine Gods and locate (or steal) an artifact known as the Black Opal Crown, which will allow the Night Mother to emerge into the world. The group actually came across the crown pretty soon after Zmija (and our other new character, a firbolg druid named Mei Ren who replaced our cleric, Amara) joined them, but the party couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the room it was in and Zsaksatyi was content that it would be safe from both our group and other adventurers there while she found her way back to the Fane (though she Sent the location to Fenthaza in case she wasn’t able to make it back). That was actually like, halfway through the session right after she’d been introduced so having her sneak off that fast would have been absolutely wild, so I kept playing her as Zmija and while there were myriad opportunities for her to be discovered—including a hallway where any non-magical non-living thing got evaporated, up to and including clothing—she never was. The fact that the only spells she ever used spell slots on were Hex, Counterspell, and Identify never really got commented upon, because prior to her joining the party we didn’t have a source for any sort of utility magic and we’d been feeling the lack for a while. She was a lot of fun to play just as Zmija once I got the hang of her, but the hidden agenda that only our DM & I knew about was an extra layer of fun, too. It would have been neat to see how the party reacted to a reveal, but unless Jim wants to take us back to Chult to actually deal with the Night Mother’s return (because without having to keep up appearances and alignments, I’m pretty sure I could have gotten that crown out of there even before the weird teleport-defying magic of the Tomb got turned off), her story is over for us—taking her outside of the setting she was designed for would be weird... plus we already have two warlocks (well, one and a half) in a party of four PCs; adding a third would be a little bit bizarre, I think.

Her more Yuan-ti features include scales down her spine and across her shoulderblades, on the backs of her hands, and on her hips and thighs—mostly in reds, oranges, and browns, but as she increases in power and connection with the Night Mother, more of them are darkening to Her blue-black; it started right at that spot between the shoulderblades where you always picture being stabbed in the back, and has expanded from there; I imagine by level 20 all of her scales would be that blue-black and may have encroached further on the more human-y leather bits, probably encroaching on her face at the last, which would make being a spy a lot more difficult (even moreso than wearing as much clothing as she already does) but I guess at level 20, do you really need to be sneaking around pretending to be human?

In direct sunlight or other very bright light, her pupils constrict to slits, which is the real reason for her heavy eye makeup—between the distraction of it and the (somewhat exaggerated) squinting that such light induces, it often goes unnoticed, as it did with her character portrait (although to be fair to my party, Alexus also has slit eyes because that’s one of the traits of elves and half elves in D&D, and also I’m not sure if they ever saw her portrait any larger than 150x150 or whatever Roll20 shows them at). Both her top and bottom canine teeth are sharper, longer, and narrower than is typical for humans, and she is careful not to grin too widely and will cover her mouth when she laughs or yawns, whether she is in disguise or not. That part I’ve never drawn though, so I can’t really point to that as something the party overlooked, heh. In hindsight, I wish I'd given her more/heavier snake features but even the official art for Yuan-Ti player characters are very light on them and getting around the differences between human and yuan-ti racials without tipping off the party was hard enough as it was—I took the 120 feet of magic-ignoring darkvision invocation to disguise the fact that she innately had darkvision, I never used my racial spells and abilities unless I was willing to “use” a spell slot on them and had another plausible way to have obtained them, the one time I got hit with a poison ability (which she was immune to) I spent a lot of time “figuring out the math” on how much HP I had to drop, etc. I also wish I’d given her darker skin, as she is supposed to be Chultian but she is significantly lighter than all the NPCs we came across. Then again, I’m as white as a sheet soaked in bleach so there’s something weird about me RPing folks of colour regardless (especially given her fake backstory, agh agh agh) so yeah. Really enjoyed her, don’t regret her, will not ever play her again rofl

In our very last session of Tomb of Annhiliation, the party—fresh off the victory over the big bad lich whose name I can never spell and his weird world-eating fetus—headed back to Port Nyanzaru via the Aarakocra village of Kir Sabal, which the previous variant of the party (of whom only Thokk remained alive and mobile enough to talk to them) had helped out significantly earlier in the campaign, unlocking a flying ritual that we were like “man we’re not coming back here if we’re gonna use it we gotta do it now” to get us the rest of the way to the port. En route, Zmija tried to leave the group and rolled a secret 15 Stealth roll... contested by 17 and 18 perception rolls from Mei Ren and Thokk, but as she wasn’t carrying much of the party’s stuff and it was the end of the campaign, they kinda just let her give some line about seeing them again in the future maybe, the Mother’s will is unknowable, etc etc. I think if Duf and Kattii didn’t know that I wanted Alexus back as badly as I did and that we were like twenty minutes (real time) away from actually getting him back, they might have considered that more suspicious than they did.

Pronunciations (and translations): (mostly C&Ped from her bio, which is the only part of her character sheet I can still access on Roll20)

Zmija Yilan: zMEE-ah yee-LAHN. Because I'm subtle as hell, that's Croatian/Russian/Ukranian (first name) and Turkish (last name) for "snake/serpent," according to the internet. What do you mean Remus Lupin is a werewolf?!

Matrymriy: mah-tRRuh mRREE (Rs are rolled). Matrymriy is Zmija's claimed patron—one of five major Zemlyashan dieties—but she'll state that she doesn't know the name that she goes by in the local dialect. That's only partly true, of course—мати мрій is Ukranian for "Mother of Dreams" (at least according to google translate), which is close enough to her patron's actual names and titles (Dendar, the Night Mother) that she can get away with it without actually raising suspicions about the true source of her powers. She'll also do that thing where if someone tries to say the name back to her she'll "correct" them by saying it exactly the same four or five times and then "give up" and accept whatever "butchered" version the speaker comes up with, except she'll do it even if they're actually saying it perfectly correctly. She may do this with her own name as well (sorry, Jim. And Duf. And Dustin. And Kattii. And Kattii's coworker, if he ever joins us and I'm still playing this character by then, lmao.) (2021 addition: and literally everyone who has a name that isn’t typically pronounced by us English-only plebians, I am so sorry I’m not better at your language)

Zsaksatyi: dzahk sot-YEE. Zmija's real name, when she isn't pretending to be a human. That doesn't mean anything as far as I know, it was just a combination of some of the syllables the random Yuan-Ti name generator was coming up with that I liked (which is also where "Itszella" was from), lol. I may end up changing it to be less cumbersome at some point, unless it comes up before then and ends up written in stone, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch for the moment.

Zemlya: zem-lyah. If pressed for more detail on where in Zemlya she's from (e.g. by someone pretending to know details about her country), her home town is Fal'shyva (fall-sheh-VAH), southeast of the capital of Hayali (HI-yah-LEE) and just north of the port city of Farazi (fah-ra-DZI), which is where she originally sailed from seven years ago. фальшива земля is Ukranian for "fake land," Hayali is Turkish for "imaginary," and Farazi is Turkish for "hypothetical," lol.

Proverbs & (approximate) Pronounciations: (if I recall correctly, asterisks indicate ones I had used, so I didn’t repeat myself too frequently)

Wziąć się w garść (zvun shih garsch): lit. take the self into the fist (polish), pull yourself together Галопом по Zemlya (gal-OH-pohm poe zem-lyah): lit. galloping across Zemlya (russian), to be hasty/haphazard. * У кого немає собаки, полю�� з котом (Ooh koe-hoe meh-MIGH-eh soe-BAH-kay, poe-LOO-yay koh-tome): lit. who does not have dog, hunts with cat (ukranian, original proverb is portugese), make do with what you have. Z choinki się urwałaś? (dzi hoink-E she urr-vahl-wash): lit. did you fall from a Candlenights(aka Christmas) tree? (polish), you are obviously not well-informed; are you dumb? * Mi o vuku (MEE oh voo-koo): lit. to talk of the wolf (croatian), speak of the devil. * Thalai muzhuguthal (tha-LIE MOOz-GOO-thal): lit. pour water over someone's head (tamil), cut off a relationship. * Хоть кол на голове теши (coat-coal nah gohl-ehvee teh-SHEE): lit. you can sharpen an axe on this head (russian), a very stubborn person.

Other Languages Are Hard Today, Let’s Just Proverb It In English:

Cat's Forehead (japanese): a tiny space, usually used humbly to refer to owned land. It fell between chairs (swedish): group work that everyone assumed someone else would do, and didn't get done as a result * It gives me a beautiful leg (french): fat lot of good that'll do me Drown the fish (french): avoid a subject by talking about anything and everything else, confuse the issue In a river with piranhas, the alligator swims backstroke (brazil): protect your weaknesses * Accusation always follows the cat (iraqi): it's easy to blame someone who can't defend themselves The honey only sticks to the mustache of he who licked it (arabic): he who smelt it, dealt it * A hungry bear does not dance (greek): the reward must be worth the cost (or at least exist) * The crayfish sides with the crab (korean): people who have a lot in common stay friends * If you can't live longer, live deeper (italian): get the most of your time * A spoon does not know the taste of soup (welsh): intelligence is not wisdom Examine what is said, not who speaks (arab): don't take things at face value * Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you (new zealand): have a positive outlook He who does not travel, does not know the value of men (moorish): wide experience is gr8 Do good and throw it in the sea (arab): don't expect anything back from kindness * Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is halved (swedish): friends make things better If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together (african): strength in numbers, speed on your own.

#xellart #dungeons and dragons #original characters #zmija yilan

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awhitehead17 · 4 years ago

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Memory Matters

Chapter 2 / Previous Chapter

Also on AO3

Enjoy! :D

If you were to ask Bruce what one of the worst things are in life, he would respond with one word: waiting.

He hated waiting. Especially when it involved waiting for one of his children to wake up from some kind injury that's ended up with them being unconscious for who knows how long and the under lying question of ‘would they even wake up?’

It’s the worst kind of dread that Bruce has probably ever experienced. Performing surgery on one of his kids was awful in itself but with the idea that they still may never recover was just something he couldn’t describe and most certainly something he didn’t want to think about.

He lets out a deep breath and tries to move away from those morbid thoughts. As easy as it was to, thinking negatively wouldn’t help the situation he’s found himself in now. His third youngest son lies on the medical bed next to him. Tim was asleep and would be for another hour or so.

J’onn had left just over 20 minutes ago after confirming that Tim’s mind had indeed been tampered with so he would lose his memories. The Martian had reported that he’s done what he could to help Tim get his memories back, however there was still a chance he wouldn’t wake up with them.

That’s what Bruce was waiting for. He was waiting for Tim to wake up to see if his son’s memory was restored or if he would remain amnesic. Even though Tim was physically unharmed, this was just as bad as when he was waiting for one of them to wake up from a life-threatening injury. That dread, fear, anger and sadness just building up inside of him waiting to be released depending on the outcome.

From where he was sat in a chair by Tim’s bad, Bruce glances at his other sons in the cave. Dick was at the computer while Jason was down on the training mats beating the crap out of a dummy. He’s aware of Damian up in the Manor currently with Alfred working on some dinner for all of them. Cass was with Barbra at the Clock Tower.

When Tim had been taken from them months ago, they were all distraught. They didn’t know who took him or why. Then eventually they worked it out, found his location and found the dreadful news of Tim being amnesic and not remembering them. Further planning took place in order to get Tim free and get him to the cave where J’onn was willing to offer his assistance.

It’s been a very stressful couple of months. And now Bruce was just waiting for his son to wake up so they could work on the steps of what’ll happen depending on how Tim wakes up.

45 minutes later Tim takes his first deep breath. Bruce was up on his feet in an instant and leaning over the boy to get a good look at his face. Tim’s features soon start scrunching up as his breathing deepens and that's when his eyes flutter open.

As much as Bruce wants to rush Tim, make sure he’s okay and ask him what he remembers he doesn’t want to terrify the boy if it’s all gone wrong. He needs to be careful until they can determine Tim’s mind state.

As Tim was waking up, Bruce was mildly aware of Jason and Dick’s presence behind him. Both brothers eagerly waiting for the younger to wake up.

Tim groans and reaches a hand up to his head as he blinks up at Bruce. A frown appears on his face as he finally opens his eyes up all the way. Bruce holds his breath, anticipating Tim’s first words.

“Ugh. Why does it feel like I got hit by a bus then trampled on by Bane?”

Unable to help himself Bruce lets out a relived sigh at his son’s choice of words. Behind him both of his older son’s chuckle.

“Good morning to you to sunshine.” Jason smirks.

On the bed Tim continues to frown, he lifts his head up trying to find the man, “Jay?” That’s when he spots Bruce hovering worriedly over him. “Bruce?”

“Hey kiddo,” Bruce says gently, “How are you feeling?” He’ll give Tim a moment to get his head together before going through an examination process.

Tim groans and starts trying to sit up. Bruce bends down, hooks his hands underneath Tim’s arms and pulls him up into a sitting position. Next to him, Dick moves and starts raising the bed up so it was in an incline position, once it was high enough Bruce leans Tim back against it.

His son blinks at him and looks around, as if taking everything in. Bruce sits down on the bed by Tim’s legs and stares at his son. “Tim.” Two blue eyes turn to look at him. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Tim takes a deep breath and lets it out as he slumps against the bed. Reaching up, Tim presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “God I don’t even know. It’s all so fuzzy.” He removes one hand to peer at Bruce, “Was I really with Ra’s that entire time?”

Before Bruce could respond, Dick steps up beside him. “We didn’t know where you were Timmy. We were looking everywhere for you and once we did find you we did everything we could to get you back home. However Ra’s wiped your memories in that time you were with him, made you question who we were, he tried to twist the story and make us the bad guys.”

Tim lets his arms slump down on the mattress. “Yeah. I think I remember that actually. I remember feeling lost and confused, not knowing who I was or where I came from. Ra’s told me a lot of stuff but anything personal he didn’t share.” Tim looks up at them questioningly “Why did he do it? Why did he take my memories? That’s a whole new level, even for him.”

Bruce wishes he knew the answer to that. He really wishes he could provide Tim the answers he obviously wants, but he couldn’t. Bruce hadn’t yet worked out why Ra’s took Tim, why he wiped his son’s mind and tried to twist the way he saw the world. He doesn’t understand the man’s obsession with his third son, it was all kinds of disturbing but unfortunately there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

A part of him wanted to lock Tim away, keep him safe and away from any prying eyes but he knows he couldn’t do that. Not that Tim would let him anyway. His son could handle himself and has proven that fact a hundred times over by now.

“I don’t know.” He says truthfully. “I wish I did Tim, I do, but we haven’t worked it out yet. By the looks of it J’onn’s been able to restore your memories, however I would still like to go through the exanimation process with you.”

Tim swallows and nods his head in understanding. “Yeah that’s fine. I’ve been expecting it.”

Jason appears the other side of the bed. He looks down at Tim before looking at Bruce with a raised eyebrow. “You gonna give baby bird here a moment to himself first old man? The kids just had his head screwed by an alien, give him a chance to rest.”

Bruce frowns at his second eldest but it was Tim who verbally protests. “Hey! I’m fine, I can handle Bruce’s examination. I feel fine, okay, just a little tired but I’m good.”

Jason looks away from Bruce and down at his brother, a disbelieving look crossing his features. The two stare at one another for a long moment, having some sort of silent stare down between them until Jason blinks. He raises a hand and smacks Tim across the back of the head before pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you ever do that to us again, you hear me? You snot nosed brat, don’t ever go off the radar like that again.”

They have another stare off but this time there seemed to be less tension and it ends with Jason smiling. He reaches out to ruffle Tim’s hair. “I gotta go. Once Bats is done with ya give me a call and we’ll chat.”

Without any other words Jason turns and exits the medical bay. He disappears out of sight and moments later they all could hear the reeve of an engine start up and as the motorbike exits the cave.

Next to him Dick chuckles. “You all gave us a scare Timbo. We were worried.”

Tim looks up at him, smiling sheepishly. “Sorry. I’ll tell Ra’s the next time he kidnaps me to leave you a note.”

Dick snorts and shakes his head. He lightly shoves Tim to the side on the bed. “Brat. Now you’re awake I’ll go tell Alfred and bring you down something. That sound good?”

“That sounds great.” Tim hums thoughtfully. “I’ve missed Alfred’s cooking.”

“I’m sure you have. I’ll be back in a bit.” As Dick leaves he pins Bruce with a look and Bruce can easily translate it into ‘don’t fuck this up.’ It’s a look he’s gotten a few times over the last couple years.

When Dick leaves, it’s just him and Tim in the medical bay. Tim watches Dick go until he couldn’t before looking down at his hands which were now in his lap. He was twiddling his fingers and wouldn’t look at Bruce.

“I’m sorry that I got taken and that all of this happened. I don’t know why-”

Bruce doesn’t hear the rest of what Tim was saying because he’s too busy going over what had just been said. Tim was sorry. Why was he sorry? He sounded so apologetic for it too, like he really believed getting kidnapped and having his mind wiped was his fault.

It was clear that he really needed to have certain conversations with Tim on the subject but those will have to happen on another day. For now he wanted to make sure his son was relatively okay and to clear something up.

Tim was still talking by the time he gets out of his thoughts, so Bruce reaches forwards and cups Tim’s head to hold him steady. Tim’s current sentence trails off and he’s blinking at Bruce with a frown. “Bruce?”

Bruce leans in close to make sure he has Tim’s full attention. “Tim I need you to listen to me okay. This was not your fault. Please don’t think that. At all. Because it wasn’t.”

“But Bruce…”

“No.” Bruce cuts off Tim’s protest. “Did you want to be kidnapped?” Tim blinks but shakes his head. “Did you choose to go with Ra’s? Or choose to have your mind wiped?”

His son shakes his head again and whispers out a quiet “no”.

Moving a hand off Tim’s face, he strokes his hair back. “It wasn’t your fault. If anyone should apologize it should be me. I’m the one that let it happen, I’m the one that lost track of you. So Tim I’m sorry that you had to endure all of that. I wish we had found you sooner than we did.”

“That’s okay. You found me in the end and got me back here.” Tim gives him a small smile. “I’m sorry. I just can’t help but think it was my fault.”

Bruce strokes Tim’s cheek. “I know. We all feel like that sometimes, particularly when it’s something we couldn’t control. Are you okay other than that? Any headaches, dizziness, memory gaps?”

“No, like I said, I just feel tired I guess. I think everything that's happened is a little blurry like my feelings are a little jumbled but nothing that is a major concern.”

Bruce nods, happy to hear that. He still gives Tim a firm look however, “That’s good but I want to still do an examination with you. But you can have some rest first and then we can do it.”

Tim nods. “Yeah. Thanks Bruce.”

Bruce pats his head and stands up from the bed. He’ll give Tim some time to rest, have something to eat before making him do anything. For now he can wait around knowing that his son was aright and how his memory loss was just a temporary thing forced upon him.

Once he knows Tim is alright he can move onto working out Ra’s real motive for this particular stunt. He’s sure Tim will want in on the project too. It’s something that’ll take time to work out. However for now, he has his son back, his son who remembers who he is and who his family are. That’s enough to keep Bruce going for the time being.

#Tim Drake #bruce wayne #dick grayson #Jason Todd #fluff #angst #amnesia #Amnesiac Tim #recovery #good dad Bruce #part two of two #fanfiction #batfam bingo 2019 #insecurities #batfamily

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gamearamamegathons · 6 years ago

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Dragon Quest V: Out of Order

Circe here! So, uh, yeah. After the hero and Henry are kidnapped, we flash forward and it turns out we end up toiling away as slaves for ten years. Nnnot much to say about that. Apparently the guy in charge around here is the high priest of the Order of Light, who claims he's going to save the world or something, and to that end he's having all these slaves build a huge temple. It's, you know, not a great scene. Things pretty much go along as normal up until we see the guards whipping a girl, and so we and Henry turn on them to try and protect her. We're launched into a battle in which I have access to all my spells, which raises a lot of questions if we could've just summoned fucking tornadoes on people this entire time. In any case, I win the fight, but we just end up jailed for our efforts. And that would be the end of that, except that it turns out the girl we tried to help was the sister of one of the guards. He heard that after the temple is finished, all the slaves will be killed, so he helps you out of there and asks you to take his sister Maria with you. So we float outta there on a barrel and end up washing up next to a nunnery.

So yeah, that happened I guess? The nuns help us get back on our feet, and Maria stays there, so it's just us and Henry...for now! This game introduces an exciting new mechanic, which is the ability to recruit monsters. And not just a temporary one-off thing like in Dragon Quest IV, monsters we fight in battle can decide to join us afterward, and become full-fledged party members. The roster of monsters here seems surprisingly deep, and we start picking them up right away, but the one I start with and keep in my party is an ordinary slime. It seems like our party size is back down to 3 for this game, so it's just me, Henry, and the slime. New party members can join on, but you need to buy a caravan, similar to how we had one in the previous game. We can find one in the town of...Oracleberry? Okay.

Apparently the big thing about this town is that there's all sorts of gambling and stuff going on at night, but I'm not really interested, so I just stock up on weapons. Henry is hilariously weak, seeing as he's level 1 and wearing rags, so I get some basic equipment on him. We travel further north, and we find a ruined town that looks like...well, it looks like Santa Rosa. Our hero is really not having a great life thus far. Apparently, after Henry was kidnapped, the queen blamed Papas, and destroyed his entire town as punishment. Which seems like kind of a non-sequitur, but we know this is just a coverup anyway, so I guess that's okay. There's an old man in town who tells us that Papas hid something valuable in the cave, and now we can take a little boat down the river into the cave to find another section of the dungeon. Here, we find a surprisingly familiar item -- it's the Zenithian Sword! We also find a note to us from Papas. In it, he says that our mother was taken away by some evil, and the only way it could be defeated is if the legendary hero wielded the Zenithian equipment against it. But, even though he spent his whole life seeking the equipment and the hero, all he ever found was this sword.

I admit, I'm a little confused about the whole thing with our mother. I guess she didn't die in childbirth after all, so either something was communicated poorly, or I just misunderstood...or else, it gave that impression on purpose? I don't know, it's weird. But I guess it doesn't matter that much. From here, I decide to go back to Alcapas to see if I can meet up with Bianca. Alcapas is fine, but it seems that Bianca's family sold the inn and moved away. So that's no good. Instead, let's go east, to Reinhart. Unsurprisingly, it seems that the queen is using King Dale as a puppet, and Reinhart has fallen into tyranny and suffering. Of course, it's not a simple matter to get inside the castle...I'll admit, I got a bit lost here. We can get in the front entrance to the castle, but the way in deeper is blocked by a guard. As we leave, Henry remarks that he remembers a secret path inside. Of course, I remember Henry's secret passage, so I immediately set about trying to get in there. We can't access the area the passage led to, but it is connected to a side door...which is locked. I spent a good while trying to find a way into this area, before I gave up and consulted a guide. It turns out I had it all wrong. You're supposed to notice that when the drawbridge is up at night, it reveals a secret tunnel underneath, which you can reach via a boat. I noticed this passage when I first entered Reinhart, but I immediately forgot. And in my defense, Henry's dialogue seemed to be reminding the player of a secret passage they already saw, so it was actively misleading. Is this because of the translation, or was it also confusing in the original? No way of knowing, I suppose.

Well, I'm grouchy about needing to use a guide for that, but there's nothing for it but to move on. The secret passage leads to a dungeon, naturally, and here we find the queen in prison. Eh? This is a bit confusing at first, but if you recall, we've seen imposter monsters before, so perhaps this isn't too surprising. What *is* surprising is that the plot needed to replace the queen with a monster at all, I mean, she seemed pretty evil from the start. I didn't bat an eye when I heard she was destroying villages and oppressing people. But apparently the real queen regrets her ruthless ambition now. Woulda been nice for you to reach that decision before you kidnapped us into slavery, lady. Well anyway, we make our way to King Dale, and Henry reveals that he's his brother. When Dale hears that his real mother is in prison, we all decide that something has to be done about it, and...I think it's Dale who tells us what to do next? In any case, we find out there's a hidden teleporter that can lead us to a tower where we can find a magic mirror that can reveal the monster's identity. No surprise, the Mirror of Ra is back.

The teleporter actually takes us just a bit south of the nunnery, so we could've walked here if we wanted, but this is a lot more convenient. Makes me wonder if we could've gotten the mirror early. This dungeon is a bit annoying because it ends with an invisible path you have to figure out by trial and error (if there was a trick to it, I didn't find it) but we eventually got to the mirror, and head back to Reinhart. It seems that Dale has tried to resolve the problem himself, and we come to the queen's chambers to see two queens there. Well, we've got the mirror, so we just use it on the queens to find that one of them is a...goblin hula dancer? Okay. This boss fight isn't very hard, so we take care of that, and save the day. After all this, Henry decides to stay by his brother's side, but luckily I've been slowly filling up my caravan with a whole host of non-human companions, so I replace him with a slime knight. Guess I'm rolling with a slime theme, here. Henry tells us that ships should be sailing in a harbor called Vista, so I guess that's where we'll be headed next.

Now that I've gotten into the game a bit, I can talk about localization. I'd hoped I'd have more interesting things to say, but largely it seems fine and pretty unremarkable. For the most part, spell names are following the conventions of the previous Dragon Warrior games, so no surprises there. It seems like a lot of the monster names are fairly literal translations, or just straight up the same name as in Japanese, since a bunch of the original names are actually in English. There are some spelling errors here and there, but nothing too surprising, it being the work of a small fan group instead of a professional localization team. There's also some incongruous swearing here and there, but it's rare. Oh, and as you may have already noticed, Nintendo of America-style censoring is out. House of Healing are called churches, people get drunk at taverns, and our dead party members are coffins instead of ghosts. But all in all, you might barely notice it's a fan translation. Well, it makes playing the game pretty smooth, so I can hardly complain.

I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest lately, so my next post might be something different. I dunno, I'm still thinking about it. In any case, I'll see you then.

#circe #marathon #dragon quest #dragon quest v

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donutthief10 · 7 years ago

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sorry folks but this is a long one.

I feel like this may not be the most appropriate place to just blurt out feelings and stuff, especially something this personal, but i don’t want to discuss it with my counselor just yet because i’m still afraid about crying in front of her. And I just want someone to hear what I say, because stuffing it in is so exhausting. and talking about it out loud makes me super sad. And I’m def on my period right now so I can feel the extra emotions.

But today some of my girls asked about my ethnic background, and it was super difficult to explain it to them. Every group, I always explain that I’m adopted, because I either share pics of my family or discuss my family background, and I feel they get confused when they see me, an Asian girl, with white parents. I am very surprised that they don’t know what the word adoption is. I guess I just assume that everyone knows what that means. It’s difficult to explain to them and I realized they were having a really hard time understanding, even when they looked up a translated word in Japanese.

But as I grow up, I never thought I would be so aware about being adopted. I feel so odd and left out, at least in the area I’ve grown up in. I am always jealous of seeing families that all look similar, or hearing my friends be told “omg you look so much like your father/mother” or if I see my friend’s sibling, I can see special features that are on both. It makes me feel sad that I don’t know my birth parents, and I feel even more… lonely knowing nothing about why they just left me in front of the hospital, like what I’ve always been told growing up. And oh man, when I tell other people that, like classmates or new friends, they say, “oh, that’s really sad.” It just always hits me for a moment and I agree and go, “yeah, it is.” And it’s just such an awkward, short, quiet moment. It always hurts on the inside, but I try not to let it get to me. But it always comes around later, and I think about it. It hurts a lot. It makes me think, why? What was wrong with me? Was it the single child rule? Were they that poor during the time I was born that they just couldn’t take care of me? Was I a burden? Did they not want me? It gets me running around in circles in my head and then I just get mad that I don’t know. I remember growing up always asking about it, “was I really just DROPPED off in front of the hospital? You’re sure? They’re sure?”. Hoping I’d get a different answer. And as I got older I realized just how sad I got each time I got the same answer. It sits in my stomach more and I never got to express how I feel about it. Even all Asian families I get jealous of. Because I don’t have that. Even my old ra housemate, she is of mixed race, her mom is white and her dad is Asian, and I’m super jealous. I don’t have any Asian family. Not that I know of. WHAT IF THEY’RE ALL DEAD?! She even freaking made a weird fetish-like story about me and my adoption and it made me so uncomfortable. In THAT moment, it just made me feel WORSE about my adoption. Fresh off the boat, for example. I’ve always thought that show looks super funny and it’s nice seeing Asian actors on tv, but I get jealous because they are still a family of all Asians. Family reunions are weird because everyone around me is white, and I still feel out of place somehow. I stick out like a sore thumb in family photos. I get so paranoid when I go out to stores with my mom or my dad. What do strangers think of me? Do they feel bad for me? Like oh, her parents must not have loved her to just toss her out and dump her in front of a hospital. I don’t know if I’m being psycho, but these are my true thoughts every single time I go out. What about friends? do they think I’m weird? Do my friend’s family think I’m weird? (super off topic but growing up I’ve always felt my friend’s grandma thought differently of me, because I’m Asian. She acted strange around me. I don’t know how I knew when I was little, but I could just feel it in my bones. I was always nervous around her, but granted it didn’t help that I was also jealous that my friend had a grandma in town that always doted on her and I didn’t have anyone like that. But back to the main focus…). Do people ACTUALLY think differently when they see a PoC with white parents? Or am I just overthinking? I also remember feeling super weird in elementary school because it was literally JUST me and a teacher that was Asian, and kids teased me about that. I felt insecure and embarrassed when mr. cong would make me be included in the Chinese New Year events the school held, going to class with a traditional Chinese dress made me embarrassed. I felt like kids were just staring at me and being judgmental. It breaks my heart to hear that I would tell my mom, “no more! I don’t want to do this Chinese stuff anymore!” because I feel it just shows how embarrassed I really am to stand out so much in a place where most of the people were white. It felt so uncomfortable and lonely.

So yeah, adoption has been super… touchy as I’ve grown up and it makes me feel more insecure about it. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. And I don’t want to sound like a baby or stupid either, but I can’t tell if I’m allowed to feel this way or not. I used to play and go to special Chinese events with the other children that were in my adoption group, but everyone just lost connection and I have no clue what the other kids are doing. Last I saw any of them was when I was maybe a young elementary student.

ok well.. this is really all i have on my mind right now. i felt like i just needed to get this off my chest because when the girls were saying thank you and good night to me, i almost cried so :)

if anyone is out there that has... idk, wise words or wants to share their experience, go ahead. or idk, just tell me it’s ok to feel this way. or don’t, maybe this is all for nothing and i’m completely overreacting. whatevs! i’m done talking for now. i feel better, i need to take meds and go to sleep. but first math :(

#adoption #rambles #im tired and i hate periods and i hate cramps and i just feel ugh #i've been feeling ugh for a while #and im stressed wooo #chinese american #delete later

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goron-king-darunia · 5 years ago

Note

Annon-Guy: Except for Raine (who's a lead-head), do you think the other 11 Symphonia characters (including Kratos and Richter) are good at swimming? What sort of swimming styles would they have underwater? There's so many.

I feel like basically everyone but Raine can swim. Raine is the only character who shows a fear of water. While this doesn’t necessarily mean lack of fear of water means the characters can swim, I feel like most of them can. Iselia isn’t as coastal as, say, Palmacosta, Sybak, or Altamira, but it’s near enough to the coastline that I feel like Colette, Genis, and Lloyd could have gone to the beach pretty often. Often enough to have learned to swim a bit.Raine’s fear of water comes from the fact that when she was young and traveling with her parents, she fell off the ship they were traveling on and nearly drowned. So it makes sense that she probably never would have learned to swim. Genis wasn’t born at this time, or if he was, he was an infant, thus, he either doesn’t remember or wasn’t alive for Raine’s traumatic experience and probably doesn’t have that same aversion to water. Mizuho is near water according to maps of Aselia, so it makes sense if Sheena knows how to swim, especially since she’s a ninja and would probably need to be able to sneak into places. Especially with the number of holes she falls into, it would make sense that she would need to swim, both to sneak into places with moats or other watery areas and so she can get herself out of any traps she falls into.Zelos frequently vacationed in Altamira to get away from the snow in Meltokio, and since he’s the chosen he was probably taught a lot of skills he’d need to, you know, not die? Because being the Chosen makes you important. Plus he’s a spoiled rich kid, so I’m sure his caretakers would have paid for swimming lessons.Presea I’m not sure of. She seems very capable, and Ozette is close to water, but she spent most of her time helping her Father until he died, I think, so Presea is one I’m not sure about. Regal is shown swimming in the OVA, I think? He’s also rich so presumably he had lessons. Plus Altamira is an island so knowing how to swim is probably important. Not to mention his title for the Altamira swimsuit event is literally “Swimmer.” Yeah. I bet he’s the best swimmer out of the group.Emil is a summon spirit, technically, so he should be able to do almost anything. Marta grew up in Palmacosta so she can probably swim.Richter lived in Sybak for a significant amount of time but... Him I’m not sure on. He’s a water elemental and Aqua likes him so... even if he can’t swim, I doubt he’s in danger but...Someone did do a comic I liked hypothesizing that he can swim and that he swims well. (This comic no longer appears online, so if someone could find the source or knows the artist, I would be eternally grateful. Posting for posterity and so a copy survives because this is too cute to fade into oblivion.) Also, this reads from right to left like a Manga because that’s how Japanese stuff works, just in case you don’t know already.

(I don’t speak Japanese, and I translated this ages ago, so it might not be fully accurate but...)Aster: Awesome! A pool! Ratatosk: Hey, aren't you going to change clothes?Emil: B-but...E: Ha... having my nipples showing (in public)...would be embarrassing...A: Well, there's also swimwear available that will cover (up to) your chest... (sound effect: Cute! )Don't worry, Emil...Ra: Please, they're all the same! (Oh please, it doesn’t matter!)[The Change of Clothes]E:Wah! This way I'm all covered up!Thanks, Aster-sa...(SFX: Dash)E: Th-this is a bathing suit for women! Now I'm even more embarrassed!Ah! Everyone is staring at me...(SFX : Dash, again... )E: And I just got hit on/catcalled by a man!A: Yeah, that figures...

(SFX: Gya! [Generic shouting, I guess])(Also, OMG, Richter's so sexy on this page I just can't...! I’m DEAD!)Richter: Hmph... Sure is noisy.A: Hey! Somebody's looking cool, huh?!E: Come on, Richter-san! Let's swim!(SFX: Doom! )(SFX: Splash, splash...)(SFX: Bubble bubble...)A: Come to think of it, I'm not really sure if Richter even can swim! (He never said...)E: Uwaaah! Richter-saaaaaan!

E: Richter-san! Don't worry, I'll save you!(SFX: Grab)A: Wait, Emil!E: Please, let me go, Aster-san! If I don't do something now, we'll need a miracle to save him! (Creative license on this one... Emil mentions something about Doraemon, a popular Japanese cartoon character [drawn in the speech bubble]. I'm not entirely sure what the reference is, and the literal translation makes no sense apart from "Aster, please let go"... Doraemon is a robotic cat [with no ears because they were eaten off by robotic mice, apparently,] who travels back in time to help his masters' great grandfather. Doraemon's pouch is said to hold an infinite number of useful gadgets, and Doraemon himself is so popular in Japan that he's sort of a symbol of hope. So, I'm just guessing that, since Doraemon has a reputation as a "miracle worker", that this was what was intended in the dialogue...)A: No, no, think about it! If you help him now, you'll get - what? - maybe one, little "thank you" in the end?A: The key is to wait to help him until he's on the verge of dying! Then:1) Rescue (aka, Hug from Behind)2) Artificial Respiration (aka, Kiss)3) Heart Massage (aka, Body-touching)E: B-bu-but...R: Emil, you saved my life! Let's get married!E: Yes! Let's get married!E: Right! Let's wait, Aster-san!A: Yeah! Ra: These guys are hopeless... What the hell're they thinking? I guess I better do something before something bad happens...

Ra: Hey! Richter! Are you alive down there?!I'm going to toss in a life ring for you, okay? Hang tight...A: Don't do anything rash/uneccesary!Emil! Hold him back!E: Got it, Aster-san!(SFX: Grab)Ra: L-let go, you lunatic!R: You guys... seriously... (or: You guys... get a life...)(SFX: Shhhhhshhhh)A: What the-?! Richter?!R: Did you forget that I can use water magic...or did you just think you could catch me off guard?E: Oh, R-Richter-san surely won't punish such an innocent little prank... not our friendly, gentle Richter-san... R-right?R: You all can try being on the receiving end of my magic up there...(Text: Diving board)All Blonds: We're sorryyyyyyyyyy!

#DotNW #art #comics #Letters from Annon Guy #Pool Comic #I'm so sad I can't find the original artist #even Saucenao failed meeeee #Anonymous #ask GKD

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segadores-y-soldados · 8 years ago

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Overwatch: Apocalypse Now

TL;DR: Overwatch is slowly building a world of apocalypses and horror stories through references to mythology, literature, and pop culture. Through these, it continues a cautionary tale of “humanity’s greatest flaw is its own ambitious arrogance,” the same arrogance which caused Overwatch to fall. It has also presented a few different routes of “hope” to try and break the cycle.

More stuff to read, if you want: Soldier: 76 Fact Sheet, References, and Some Analyses Reaper Art Assets Reaper References Reaper and Soldier: American Cultural References Ana as the source of conflict

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” - Genesis 11:3 - 4

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: Like much of the still-growing city, the massive tower at the center of Oasis is still under construction and has no estimated completion date. Though the current structure is already one of the world's tallest skyscrapers, the final plans call for it to extend even further, easily becoming the world's tallest freestanding building. Not much is known about the tower's purpose, other than it ties into the city's massive data gathering and computational efforts. - Oasis Travel Tips

In the hype of Oasis dropping and the ever wonderful jump-pad, many people missed the very quiet and almost hidden lore about the city that was simultaneously released by Blizzard. The “Oasis Travel Tips” revealed that the “city of science” was controlled by a group of ministries governed by “a brilliant collective of eight of the world's leading scientists.” Among the lore dropped was the revelation that the Gardens map was intended to evoke the Hanging Gardens of Babylon -

And that ��the tower” in the distance was a clear homage to The Tower of Babel.

For those of you who are not familiar with the story of The Tower of Babel, it is a tale from Genesis that explains why there are so many languages. In the story, all of humanity shared one language, and as means of this communication, began to build a tower to reach the heavens and God Himself. When God saw what humanity was doing, He destroyed the tower and scattered the people, giving them different languages so that they could not perform such a feat again. The lesson here is that the arrogance of humanity led them to believe they could build something as impressive as God Himself (or so some say).

While it is difficult to detangle The Tower of Babel from its religious connotations, the emphasis here is that “one should not be so arrogant” or the “higher powers that be” will bring their wrath upon you.

Which is precisely the overarching story that Overwatch’s lore is building. I’ve been wondering for some time how to structure all these disparate pieces of lore into something that connects to the major themes of “Who watches the Watchmen?”, “History repeats itself,” and “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” but with Uprising, we finally have a lot more tangible proof that the “grand theme” of Overwatch’s lore - both the “canon” lore outside of the game, and numerous “in-game” references - are building a new version of an age-old tale of the apocalypse and “the ancient horrors” lurking just beyond human perception. These “larger forces” are dropped through mythology and religious references, but also a number of pop culture and “horror story” references that litter the game. I’ve tried to collect the majority of them here. But to start with, we need to cover some background info.

1. The Nameless City of Oasis

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die."

I’m not gonna claim to be any authority on Lovecraft, but any Lovecraft or Eldritch horror fan should look at Oasis with a slight skepticism. Already we have references to the Tower of Babel with the map, and there are numerous in-game lines that imply that something vaguely sinister is going on beneath the shiny surface of the city.

Junkrat: “This place is a bit posh for me…” Symmetra: “The Vishkar Corporation would love to have a presence here.” Zenyatta: “What a fascinating place! Can science alone unlock the path to enlightenment?”

The most important one, however, is this set (I cannot find the direct quotes, so I’m basing this off memory but):

Sombra: “What are we doing here?” Reaper: “We’re here to see an old friend.”

Now this is extremely interesting. One of the prevailing fan theories is that Angela “Mercy” Ziegler may have connections to Oasis - she is depicted in the Recall short as being located somewhere in the Middle East, particularly somewhere in present-day Iraq, which is where “the city of Oasis” is located. In the Reflections comic, she is shown to be working on some sort of “active field duty” in a tent that is brightly-lit. In the “We Are Overwatch” short, she rescues a young girl on the edge of a large city with multiple skyscrapers in the background.

I know there is already speculation that, if Mercy is in fact located in Oasis, Reaper is “out for her.” Another version of the theory goes that Reaper is coming to see her to ask her for help with his current state of existence (note that I am not a fan of the “Mercy botched saving Reaper” theory because that has been effectively debunked by Chu).

Because if there is anyone capable of helping Reaper restore himself, it would be “the doctor of death herself,” Angela Ziegler.

We know from Dragons, Recall, Hero, and the Museum Heist that 1) ultimates such as the Dragons and Tactical Visor are canon, 2) Reaper is capable of transforming himself into smoke, 3) Winston’s in-game abilities - including his Rage ultimate - are canon. At the moment, there is no reason to believe that Mercy’s Resurrection ultimate is not canon. People will no doubt argue that I’m making a leap of logic here, but until confirmed otherwise, I’d say it’s likely that all Ultimates are canon.

And therefore this means that Mercy knows how to revive the dead.

More than anything, this means that if Mercy is associated with Oasis, that we should be giving a solid, hard look at what exactly this implies for lore. I’m not saying that Oasis “having Lovecraftian connotations is 100% canon,” but rather it is important to note that the types of references a story builds for itself almost certainly influences the type of story it wants to portray. The fact that Mercy has not one, but multiple skins that are related to “raising the dead in morally-ambiguous ways” is telling. She has two Valkyrie skins, the Imp and Devil skins, and the Witch skin (which literally carries “a book of life” on her).

Again, I already know these skins aren’t canon. That’s beside the point. The point here is that all of this combined creates a very ambiguous tone about Mercy and Oasis - the undercurrents of mistrust, the sensation that “something lurks in the city,” the feeling that “humanity is playing with forces it cannot control,” the idea that “a doctor who defies death” lives and works there, the idea that the “in-game embodiment of Death Himself” is going there to “visit an old friend.” These are all things that build an eerie sense of foreboding.

Exactly as Lovecraft would have wanted it.

Lovecraft’s Nameless City builds the groundwork “lore” for his Cthulhu mythology. The “nameless city” is a city in the Arabian desert, older than Babylon, implied to have been “lost” to the ages as humanity began to conquer the earth. The ancient race that built the city retreated underground, where they continued their worship of the Great Old Ones. The human protagonist of The Nameless City wanders deeper and deeper until he is beset by the presence of the ancient race and some form of the Great Old Ones, ostensibly for “intruding on a realm he had no right to access.”

“I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind till oblivion—or worse—claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing—too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours when one cannot sleep.”

Here again we have a reference that “humanity is toying with forces it cannot hope to control” - time and death, an understanding of the universe much larger than “simple mortal sentience” can bear. Above all else, The Nameless City is where the author of Lovecraft’s mythological Necronomicon first begins writing the book, which originally has an Arabic title of “Al Azif,” loosely translated by Lovecraft himself as “that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons.”

Demons being jinn/djinn, or “genies.” And there is one character in Overwatch who has a Djinn skin.

2. God Programs and Null Sector

It always struck me as odd that Zenyatta has not one, but four mythology references that are NOT Tibetan or Nepalese in the slightest. In fact, he has two Djinn-based skins and two Egyptian skins (Ra and Sunyatta) which always seemed better suited to Ana or Pharah. Zenyatta did not get a Tibetan skin until the Halloween special, where he got a death-based skin with a Tibetan skull cap (again - I get this is not canon, but it is telling that his Halloween reference was to skull artwork). I do not doubt that Zenyatta’s skins - much like the other skins in the game - are simply following “a rule of cool” but like Mercy’s skins, they should give us some pause. In mythology, the djinn are trickster-type creatures that can span a range of morality (again, very similar to Mercy’s Valkyrie and Witch skins), and their whimsical natures certainly match Zenyatta’s, even if their origin is a bit far from Nepal.

The Ra and Sunyatta skins, however, are really interesting when you consider the fact that the only “canon” God Program currently revealed is Anubis.

For those of you that don’t know, Anubis is featured in Pharah’s comic “Mission Statement,” where it is revealed to be a supercomputer Omnic dubbed “a God Program” that is capable of mind-controlling other Omnics.

Which, you know, is the kind of stuff that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones are capable of doing.

What is not stated outright in the Mission Statement comic, but is instead implied (once again, by Reaper) in Old Soldiers and in other in-game dialogue, is that Helix Securities is somehow “messing around” with “something beyond their control” by doing strange and possibly unethical experiments on Anubis, and that Anubis “lashed out” against them (causing Helix to send in Pharah’s Raptora squad to put it down).

The only other characters to have Egyptian mythology skins are Pharah herself (shockingly called “Anubis”) and her mother Ana (“Horus”). It is implied in Old Soldiers that Ana is attempting to “find out” what happened in Mission Statement through a Talon associate Harkim (the man Reaper speaks to).

So what does this mean?

Once again, humanity is playing with forces much larger than itself - in this case, a literal supercomputer that rivals “gods” - and the effects of this trickle down all the way to Pharah, Ana, and Reaper, who have to struggle with the aftermath of this “small scale disaster.” Only unlike Oasis, where a lot of the “inferences” are “non-canon” or simply implied, Mission Statement is canon to the overarching lore. While the “Egyptian god skins” are non necessarily canon, we can see that Blizzard is pulling in characters like Pharah, Ana, and Zenyatta into a shared “background mythos,” much like Mercy and Oasis.

And this has direct implications on Uprising’s lore and background.

In the Uprising comic, we see that Null Sector arises from pushback against anti-Omnic sentiments in London, which city officials and Mondatta were trying to rectify when Null Sector attacked. Overwatch - more specifically, Commander Jack Morrison and his fellow leaders Ana Amari and Gabriel Reyes - are put in a position where they are forced to make a difficult choice: stand on the sidelines and watch the situation deteriorate even further, or take action and risk getting in further international trouble with their Director and the rest of the world’s governments. As most people know, they do the latter.

“Canon Overwatch lore” shows that a team of four - Reinhardt, Mercy, Tracer, and Torbjorn - go into King’s Row and deliver a bomb before taking down Null Sector’s main base and freeing the hostages. But what is extremely interesting are a number of the new interactions - both canon and non-canon - that can be found in the mode.

(Note that most of these are based on memory):

1. A Torbjorn-Tracer interaction in which Tracer protests that “Not all Omnics are like this.” Torbjorn responds along the lines of “Look around - this has happened before and this will happen again!” He seems to be implying that the normal King’s Row map - in which a group of attackers is trying to push an EMP to the Power Plant to disable “hostile Omnic forces” - is a result of the consequences of the events of Uprising, and even that Null Sector may return in the future. However, this also builds on the old adage of “history repeats itself” which once again is a major thematic issue of Overwatch.

2. Null Sector troopers will say the lines of “Error: Faulty Programming” when Zenyatta’s discord orb is placed on them in All Heroes mode. 3. Orisa has a new voiceline when being revived where she says “I think I saw the Iris.”

The last two are super fascinating because we have two new ideas being presented here. The first is that Zenyatta’s discord orb operates by disrupting mental or computational abilities and works by “disorienting” enemies, allowing allies to target them in their “mentally weakened state.” Even though this interaction is not canon, it once again builds on the idea of mind control/mind effect that Anubis and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones have. Zenyatta’s standard lines about the ability - “Bask in the shadow of doubt.” “Darkness falls.” “You are your own worst enemy.” “There is disquiet in your soul.” - are among some of the most ominous and sinister lines in the game. With this, Zenyatta’s ties to the “background mythos” of “uncontrollable chaos” lurking at the edges of Overwatch’s fictional world get much stronger, especially now that it’s shown he can perform these same abilities on other Omnics.

Orisa’s new voiceline is extra telling because previously it was implied that “only enlightened Omnics” could see the entity known as “The Iris,” but now a “one month old” Omnic with limited experiences in the world has implied that she has seen it upon her death and “resurrection” (once again, we should be thinking of all the shady stuff about Mercy here). Since Bastion does not have the ability to speak any known human language (oh look, another lowkey Babel reference), Orisa is now the third Omnic character to confirm the existence of the Iris outside of Zenyatta and Mondatta.

3. Gazing into the abyss - Sombra, The Eye Conspiracy, and the Popol Vuh

I know that other people have already put forward the idea that the Eye featured at the center of Sombra’s conspiracy web is “the Iris” - personally, I’m not a big fan of the idea but I want to examine it because the motif of “eyes” is recurring in Overwatch. We have, at a glance (heh): 1. Ana and Pharah both having “eyes of Horus” tattoos.

2. Ana, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn are all missing eyes.

3. Soldier: 76 with his “enhanced vision” thanks to Tactical Visor.

4. Widowmaker’s “multi-view” camera headgear.

5. Hanzo’s “eyes of the dragon.”

6. Zenyatta’s Iris references.

7. Winston and Mei both wear glasses (and reference it).

8. Sombra’s Eye conspiracy.

9. Orisa’s new voiceline about the Iris.

10. Multiple characters in masks or headgear that obscure their eyes.

11. McCree’s “Deadeye” ultimate.

12. The literal name of “Overwatch.”

I’ve probably missed some, but in any case, the associated motifs of eyes/vision/watching things is constant and ubiquitous in Overwatch (even down to the name of the game itself), which wraps about around to the very blunt and obvious “Who watches the Watchmen” theme that the series has going on. With Uprising, we have the implied idea that “Overwatch has steadily overgrown its original parameters and started acting as ‘world police’ for justice and assistance.” It may mean well, but ultimately, Overwatch is directly told by Director Petras, the UK government, and public protests (shown on the news blurbs) that “its oversight and protections” are no longer wanted or needed, even if its intentions are good and pure.

It is not surprising then, that the idea of Overwatch “becoming too ambitious - even with good intentions” brought down the “wrath” of something even larger than it, something with the ability to move forces such as Talon, LumériCo, Volskaya, etc.

Something that “watches” the “Overwatchmen.”

Personally, I think the idea that the Eye Conspiracy being the same as The Iris is a little on-the-nose, especially since a lot of the “background mythos” is a series of obscure references that require semi-inane “connecting the dots” to find (am I self-depreciating here? Yes), but it is a promising theory, especially with the new stuff surround Null Sector, Zenyatta, and Orisa. So while I don’t want to talk to much about “what the Eye Conspiracy could be,” I do want to get into a little bit of “background mythos” around Sombra -

Because it too involves “deaths that cannot die.”

Dorado itself was rather blindly (hah) designed by the Overwatch team who, in their haste to make a “bright, colorful village map,” drew references from an Italian city by the sea (gj guys, way to double-check your sources). But the LumériCo power plant was almost certainly designed based on the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant, which exists in almost the exact same location as Dorado’s maps (note that the in-game map within the LumériCo appears to be incorrect, as the Uprising map confirms that Dorado is supposed to be further south on the Gulf of Mexico). More than anything else, the LumériCo power plants are designed to evoke the pyramids of Aztec and Mayan design. These were massive stone builds of ritual, political, and social power that were meant to mimic the mountains that gods such as the Feathered Serpent, Tlaloc/Chaac, and Huitzilopochtli were believed to live on. They were also meant to be displays of power and regality by various kings, queens, and rulers.

So like the Temple of Anubis, the LumériCo power plant is a remixing of “real world mythologies” with the dev team’s “vision of the future,” a vision where humanity celebrates its diversity and the beauty of its multitude of ideas and histories with a “futuristic twist.”

But what it also implies is that Portero - the CEO of LumériCo - is imposing himself as a psuedo-ruler in Mexico.

And that’s not just me “reading the inferences” like with Oasis or Mercy. This is outright what Sombra calls him in the Sombra ARG.

“Long live the King!

“The King Guillermo Portero of LumériCo invites cordially, his loyal servants, to participate in his crowning event and to celebrate his infinite greed and treason toward the people of México. We gave coordinated the publication of info that demonstrates that Portero is a viper, that have for a long time ripoff the riches of our country for his own wealth. He has corrupted our government, turned our sisters and brothers into beggars, and he won’t stop until controlling the whole country under his dominance. But we, Los Muertos, won’t tolerate the celebration of his reign of corruption. We’ll demonstrate to our new conquistadores (conquerors) who will take the reins of the future of our country! On November 1st, we’ll dethrone the King Viper and we’ll celebrate the recovery of our home.”

Surrounding Sombra and Los Muertos is a mythos of revolution and resistance, notably against a “new world oligarchy” of which Sombra perceives Portero to be “only the start.” In Infiltration we see her take on Katya Volskaya through blackmail and “trickery,” and in her Origins video, Sombra outright declares war on “The Eye Conspiracy.”

“I’ll find out who really runs the world. I’ll find their weaknesses and how to exploit them. And when I do - I’ll be the one pulling the strings.”

Whether intentional or not, Sombra’s arching story and its motifs parallels one of the major Mayan mythologies - the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh. The Hero Twins are symbols of life and death, war and peace, day and night. In the most famous version of their adventures, the Hero Twins take on the lords of Xibalba (the underworld) and “beat them at their own games” using information, trickery, and cunning. In some versions of the myth, they go on to become the Sun and the Moon, and watch over the world for the rest of eternity.

We have seen Sombra challenge “the reign” of Portero and through her leaks, she forced him to resign under public humiliation. We have seen her start to make a move against Volskaya Industries. And we know, from her interactions with Reaper, that she is semi-aware that “something is going on with someone in Oasis.” Michael Chu has stated that Sombra’s interactions with Reaper are canon, and therefore, “the shadow” and “Death himself” are relatively close (as implied by the “you don’t mind if I call you Gabe, do you?”/”stick to the mission” interaction).

Interesting here too, again whether intentional or not, is the idea that figures who represent or are associated with Death - Sombra, Los Muertos, Reaper, Null Sector, Zenyatta, Anubis, Mercy - are “pushing back” against much larger powers, resisting against those who “watch the Overwatchmen,” and trying to reclaim power.

4. I’m not the one with the statue.

Before there was Lovecraft, before the Nameless City, before the Cthulhu mythos, there was Shelley’s Ozymandias.

“I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Surprise, surprise - a Very Important Statue of a Very Important Character in Overwatch got referenced in Uprising. Surprise, surprise - this same statue was depicted from The Very Beginning in the Museum Heist short, before Soldier: 76/Jack Morrison had even been revealed as a character.

Surprise, surprise - this very same statue is implied to have been blown up in the Swiss Base explosion (you can actually see a “trunkless leg” in the Soldier: 76 Origins video).

And - surprise, surprise - Ozymandias is the “superhero alter-ego name” of Adrian Viedt in Watchmen, the “true antagonist” of the story and whose jaded, misguided morals designs an “impending disaster” in order to try and force humanity to unite against it.

“Before Manhattan leaves to create life in another galaxy, Veidt asks him if he "did the right thing in the end". Manhattan replies that "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends", leaving Veidt in doubt about how long the peace will last.”

In Watchmen, there are constant themes of “history repeats itself” and “humanity’s arrogance and desire for personal short-term satisfaction outweigh idealism and hope for long-term peace and prosperity.” And of course the ever prevalent theme of “Who watches the Watchmen?”

And since Overwatch straight up rips off Watchmen, it’s not surprising at all that these major themes have worked themselves into the “background mythos” and outright lore of the game, its characters, and its world. Of course, Overwatch attempts to portray its version of Ozymandias - Jack Morrison/Soldier: 76 - in a more...morally acceptable light, framing his decisions as “doing the right thing but ultimately sacrificing his ‘empire’ for it.” If anything, Uprising shows Morrison as a character “setting out on the right track, but ultimately brought down by the corruption of the larger forces in the world - the conspiracy that invades his organization, that seemingly ‘brings down and blinds (hah) his friends Ana and Gabriel,’ and that literally attempts to kill him.”

Of course, when you read between the lines of the Uprising comic, we can see that “the rest of the world” has begun to perceive Overwatch a rather different way - as a policing force that has started to overstep its bounds, impose its ambitions of “peace” upon the world “through means of trickery and deceit (Blackwatch) and even outright control methods (Overwatch Strike Team),” and aims to “reach for the impossible.”

And so we come to the idea of “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Much like the Tower of Babel, much like Mission Statement, much like the Sombra ARG, we have a recurring “background story” where “the larger powers that be” are fighting (from their perspective) to “keep humanity in its rightful place,” to restrict and lay low its ambitions and “arrogance,” to show that - no matter how well-meaning - overstepping one’s bounds will result in disaster and strife. If Overwatch could not achieve global peace “through its Strike Teams and Blackwatch,” then how can anyone else?

If the Ozymandias of the poem could not maintain his empire and his power, if even Time Itself brought him down and ruined “his works,” if even Time Itself could wear down on the Nameless City, if even after twenty to thirty years of hard work for peace could not solidify Overwatch’s worth in the world -

Then what will defy Time Itself?

What will break the cycle of history repeating itself?

Overwatch has set up a few “routes” - all of them paralleling each other - out of this “background mythos of endless horror and despair” it has built for itself.

The first is Recalled Overwatch - the “Neutral/Chaotic Good” route. In this Route, Winston and Tracer have begun to rebuild the fallen Overwatch from the rubble, in direct defiance of the Petras Act. We know that, in due time, Genji attempts to join them (after Dragons), and that he invites Hanzo along. Other agents who receive the Recall notice are Mercy, McCree, Reinhardt, and Torbjorn. This is the route that will “do things the right way this time,” where “the darkness” is fought back with “the light,” where “discord and disquiet” are overcome by “harmony and tranquility.” The uncertainty here is that there is nothing which prevents this route from repeating the same history as its predecessor.

The second is the Old Soldiers - the “True Neutral/Chaotic Neutral” route. In this route, we have Soldier: 76 and Ana setting off on their own, looking for “answers” to the “war that never ends.” What exactly Soldier and Ana are looking for is unknown - arguably, they’re looking for a way to bring down the conspiracy that ended Overwatch, but this is never stated outright. The problem with this route is that since there’s only two of them, they may never find what they are looking for.

The third route is the “Even Death may die” - the “True Neutral/Chaotic Evil” route. This is the route that, in my opinion, is by far the most interesting. It is the route that follows Sombra, Reaper, and Widowmaker. We know for certain that Sombra is out to find and control “the larger forces that really run the world,” and arguably Reaper “may be in on this plan.” Widowmaker’s role in this is uncertain. This is the route that probably parallels the Hero Twins - descending into “the underworld” to fight “the Lords of Death” with tricks, cunning, and intelligence, besting them at their own games. This is the route that would counter “whatever Great Old Ones exist” in Overwatch’s world with their own abilities - Sombra’s hacking and systems, Reaper’s inability to die, and (if she’s part of it) Widowmaker’s sniping abilities. The issue with this route is that there is nothing preventing these individuals from being “corrupted” by the same forces that “corrupted” the Eye Conspiracy and led to the fall of Overwatch.

One thing I want to stress is that none of these routes are necessarily “morally or ethically correct.”

After all -

It depends on how you see it.

There is a lot here for the development team to play with. It’s taken them quite a lot of time to get their feet on the ground, but now that they have an increasingly solid foundation to work on, they can build their bizarre and beautiful world however they want, with increasingly interesting and oddball references. With Uprising, we got stuff as wonderfully whimsical as the Selfie and Baby highlight intros, the Contra sprays, the Null Sector skins, etc, but we also got stuff as eerie and surreal as the Zenyatta discord orb lines, Orisa’s “Was that the Iris?” line, the strong implication of Null Sector using reprogramming to make Bastions and OR-14s fight against their will, and Torbjorn’s lines of “this has happened before and it will happen again.”

What the Overwatch team is building here is a series of “range of canon” background mythologies (some that are “non-canon but merely background white noise that colors how the players view the world,” to “these are kinda sorta canon and you should be paying attention to how we use these references,” to “these are outright canon and we will be using them blatantly for whatever we want”) that develop the world in a set of unique ways. Even for the stuff that “isn’t canon,” it still exists in the game and it still tints how players interact with the characters, their personalities, and their story arcs. Reaper’s Mariachi skins and Zenyatta’s Djinn skins may never matter “in the overall story,” but they still show small “slices” of personality that reveal something new about them. Similarly, Zenyatta’s lines about his discord orb may never “make it to canon,” but they still demonstrate that “something dark” lurks within them.

And this is, arguably, both the strength and weakness of this style of storytelling: anything and everything is open and available for use. You can design a world where a map references the Tower of Babel and more or less imply that “the doctor who defies death” lives there, but you can change this at the drop of a hat. You can create a robot monk whose abilities rely on amplifying “the disquiet” in other characters’ souls, but then say that his statements on these abilities are not “canon.” You can craft a narrative surrounding three old comrades who have had a major falling out and then leave massive gaps in the explanation for this problem. You gain freedom, flexibility, and openness in exchange for lore that stands on a foundation as steady as shifting sands.

So yes, I know that like half of this essay or whatever “isn’t canon.” But if Mercy’s Witch skin has impacted how you view her, or knowledge of Watchmen has impacted how you understand Overwatch as a whole, or hearing Orisa’s voiceline about the Iris has changed your perception of it, then does it matter “how canon” it is?

If it has impacted how you see it

Then it has already influenced how you interpret it.

---------

This doesn’t even BEGIN to cover all the apocalypse references made by characters like Roadhog, Junkrat, Ana, Reaper, etc. There are, frankly, a massive amount of voicelines that - once again - shade how the player perceives the characters and the world of Overwatch at large. This doesn’t even cover backstories like Reaper or Mei or D.va, that latter of whom straight up has Godzilla/Evangelion references in her background. And this doesn’t even cover stuff like the battle of Eichenwalde, or Deadlock, or “HAL-fred Glitchbot” (who is literally a reference to HAL and Alfred Hitchcock, both elements of “Hollywood horror”), or even the issues around Los Muertos. There’s a ton here that shows that the Overwatch devs are dropping apocalyptic and/or horror references as varied as Mad Max to Apocalypse Now to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Neon Genesis Evangelion to The Headless Horseman to “the grandfather of all sci-fi” Frankenstein to “the grandfather of American macabre Romanticism” Edgar Allan Poe.

The “background mythos” of Overwatch is filled with horror story references - everything from The Raven, to Thriller, to Psycho. Behind the bright colors and beautiful maps are canon stories that imply something darker - a God Program being contained against its will, a yakuza clan that “needs to be reigned in,” a city “building the tallest tower in the world,” an arms-dealing gang “coming back into power,” an EMP being delivered to “hostile Omincs” - and a whole slew of “non-canon references” that display something even deeper, “even darker” that lurks beneath them all.

#overwatch #overwatch lore #my essays #my writing #i don't even know what to call this #sorry to drop this on yall on a sunday night #lol #references #ideas #inspiration

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malteseboy · 8 years ago

Photo

translated from @funwithlanguages‘ post

Maltese verbs do not have an infinitive form, verbs are shown in the past 3rd person singular masculine.

to be

the present form of “to be” in Maltese works with the personal pronouns and they act as the verb also!

I am - Jien(a)

You are - Int(i)

He is - Hu(wa)

She is - Hi(ja)

We are - Aħna

You are - Intom

They are - Huma

there is - hemm have - kellu do - għamel go - mar want - ried can - seta’ need - kellu bżonn think - ħaseb know - af say - qal like - għoġob speak - tkellem learn - tgħallem understand - fehem

Conjunctions

that (as in “I think that..” or “the woman that..”) - li and - u / w or - jew but - imma because - għax / għaliex though - għalkemm so (meaning “therefore”; e.g. “I wanted it, so I bought it”) - għalekk / allura if - jekk

Prepositions

note that some don’t have a fixed translation, and are mostly fused with the definite articles & personal pronouns as part of the grammar rules

of - ta’ to - għall- from - minn in - fil- / ġo at (someone’s house for example) - għand at (a time) - fil- with - ma’ about - dwar / fuq like (meaning “similar to”) - bħal / tipo for - għall- before - qabel after - wara during - matul

Question Words

who - min what - xiex (if you want to say for example “what boy?” add the suffix x’ to subject word: x’tifel?) where - fejn when - meta why - għala / għaliex / għalfejn how - kif how much - kemm which - liem / liema

Adverbs

a lot - ħafna a little - ftit well - mela badly - ħażin only - biss also - ukoll / wkoll very - ħafna too (as in “too tall”) - wisq too much - iżżejjed so (as in “so tall”) - tassew so much - ħafna more - iktar / aktar less - inqas as.. as (e.g. “as tall as”) - daqs most - l-iktar least - l-inqas better - aħjar best - l-aħjar / l-aqwa worse - agħar worst - l-agħar now - issa then - imbagħad here - hawn there - hemm maybe - forsi always - dejjem usually - normalment often - spiss sometimes - kultant / xi drabi never - qatt today - illum yesterday - ilbieraħ tomorrow - għada soon - daqt almost - kważi already - diġà even - anke enough - biżżejjed

Adjectives

those with link change depending on gender and amount

this - dan that - dak good - tajjeb bad - ħażin all - kollha some - xi no - ebda any - xi many - ħafna few - ftit most - aktar other - ieħor same - l-istess different - differenti one - wieħed two - tnejn / żewġ a few - ftit first - l-ewwel next - li jmiss last (e.g “last Friday”) - l-aħħar last (meaning “final”) - l-aħħar easy - ħafif hard - iebes hard (difficult) - diffiċli early - kmieni late - tard important - importanti interesting - interessanti boring - mhux interessanti beauiful - sabiħ ugly - ikrah big - kbir small - żgħir happy - kuntent sad - mdejjaq busy - għandu x’jagħmel (lit: he has stuff to do) ready - lest favorite - favorit new - ġdid old - qadim right (meaning “correct”) - korrett wrong - ħażin true - veru

Nouns

everything - kollox something - xi ħaġa nothing - xejn everyone - kulħadd someone - xi ħadd no one - ħadd Maltese - Malti English - Ingliż thing - ħaġa person - persuna place - post time (as in “long time”) - żmien time (as in “I did it 3 times”) - darba friend - ħabib (m) ħabiba (f) woman - mara man - raġel money - flus country - pajjiż Malta - Malta city - belt language - lingwa word - kelma food - ikel house - dar store - ħanut office - uffiċċju company - kumpanija manager - maniġer coworker - kollega job - xogħol work - xogħol problem - problema question - mistoqsija idea - idea life - ħajja world - dinja day - ġurnata year - sena week - ġimgħa month - xahar hour - siegħa mother, father, parent - omm, missier, ġenitur daughter, son, child - bint, iben, tifel (m) tifla (f) wife, husband - mara, raġel girlfriend, boyfriend - għarusa, għarus

More Verbs

work - ħadem see - ra use - uża believe - emmen seem - deher come - ġie love - ħabb leave - telaq return - irritorna give - ta take - ħa bring - ġab look for - fittex find - sab receive - rċieva buy - xtara try - pprova start - beda stop - waqaf finish - lesta continue - kompla wake up - qam eat - kiel drink - xorob happen - ġara feel - ħass create - ħalaq meet - ltaqa’ ask - saqsa reply - wieġeb read - qara write - kiteb listen - sema’ remember - ftakar forget - nesa choose - għażel decide - iddeċieda be born - twieled die - miet kill - qatel live - għex stay - baqa’ change - biddel help - għen send - bagħat walk - mexa dress (put clothes on) - libes desire - xtaq dream - ħolom ride - rikeb smile - tbissem win - rebaħ lose - tilef dance - żifen sing - kanta open - fetaħ close - għalaq gather - ġabar

Phrases

hello - ħello bye - ċaw thank you - grazzi you’re welcome - ta’ xejn / m’hemmx imniex excuse me - skużani sorry - jiddispjaċini It’s fine (response to an apology) - tinkwetax / mhux problema please - jekk jogħġbok yes - iva no - le okay - owkej my name is - jien jisimni what’s your name? - x’jismek? nice to meet you - għandi pjaċir how are you? - kif int? I’m doing well, how about you? - jien tajjeb/tajba, u int? sorry?/What? (if you didn’t hear something) - xiex? how do you say _? - kif tgħid_? what does _ mean? - xi tisser _ ? I don’t understand - m’inhiex nifhem could you repeat that? - tista‘ tirrepeti? could you speak more slowly, please? - tista‘ titkellem iktar bil-mod, jekk jogħġbok? really? - vera? I guess that - naħseb li It’s hot (talking about the weather) - xi sħana It’s cold (talking about the weather) - x’bard

#remade this bc the previous one was shit #also there could be less than 300 words sorry but i'm a mess #maltese #maltese language #learn maltese #maltese resources #malti #lingwa maltija #malta #maltese islands #300 words #languages #langblr #polyglot #areistotle #language tumblr

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theusclegend-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Fri, Aug 17th: Let the Games Begin

So after the fair I went back to my dorm. I was pretty excited I was able to land a job in like three minutes. The next event on my schedule was the residential cup. I figured I wanted to look slightly weird but not too weird, so I put on my rubber duck earring and relaxed before the event.

All of IRC went down into the lounge. We were all wearing the shirts marked with our residential hall’s flag and walked down to the area in front of Tommy Trojan along with the other residential halls. All of the marching band, cheerleaders, and the spirit team who were not freshman and knew the songs came down to perform for us and pump us up for this years football season.

The band was fun to watch as they played songs like “All I Do is Win” and “California Love.” It was pretty much breathtaking how well they had those songs translated to marching band instruments from pop songs. The best part was that the person who was the hype man was this older man (60-70s) who had a voice like a ten year old chainsmoker. All the emotions were there, and he was excited and talking about how we were going to go 13 and O, but then he also had some weird fluctuations and roughness in his voice as if it had given up long ago. I joked with a few of my friends how I wanted him to be the man who narrates my life.

After that all of the residential hall’s went to the some sort of sports stadium I don’t remember the name of. I just remember all the students passed through a metal detector and that all of the freshman ended up holding traffic up for a solid two minutes as we crossed the rode. When we got in we were given some balloon noise maker things (two balloons and a straw to blow them both up). They were the shape of the I tetrominoes. There was a bunch of music orchestrated by the same DJ as the BBQ. DJ Mal-Ski is pretty good to be completely honest with you. He has some kick ass music and seems to love his job. After awhile the music died down and it was time to pick the freshman to represent each residential hall. The RA’s needed to select seven people, but they accidentally picked eight, so we had to decide who went back the old fashioned way. Through a game of nose-toes (basically you need to not be the last one to touch your nose and the game happens spontaneously without warning other than one person saying “nose-toes”). Sadly, Scrunchie was the slowest and ended up having to go back, but he was cool about it. My friend Boaty McBoatface, who I met at the barbecue and is a hella good dancer, was there though and up for whatever challenge lay ahead.

So, with all of our representatives selected, it was time for us to hear the challenge. It was a relay race of sorts, with each of us doing a different challenge that was in the style of the 2000’s game show “Minute To Win It.” There were seven challenges, one for each of the representatives to do. Challenge one was blowing cups off of a table by inflating a balloon and using only its force to move the cups. Challenge two was to move fifteen M&M’s from one plate to another via straw. Challenge three was to get an oreo from your forehead to your mouth, this was my calling :3. Challenge four was stacking 15 cups and then destacking them. Challenge five was popping all the balloons in a black bag, and challenge six and seven was just quickly retrieving puzzle pieces and bringing them back to your team so that they could try to remake their housing building’s symbol.

The first challenge went alright, we were roughly third to complete it. The second challenge Boaty was able to pull us really far ahead as he demolished that M&M challenge. My challenge was pretty interesting. First try, the oreo made it to the side of my nose, but I was missing that finess to get it to my lips. Second try, I tried something similar, but it fell onto the floor. I was going to use that one (as I was dedicated to win this), but the person validating my task completion quickly gave me another oreo. This oreo was the oreo to make it. I placed it on my head and quickly got it to the side of my nose. I can’t touch my tongue to my nose, so I was awkwardly flicking my tongue at it while twisting my head slightly to the side so the oreo would stay balance. I was slowly able to wiggle it towards the end of my nose and in one foul swoop I caught it in my mouth and immediately ran back. My team was counting on me and I just gave us another lead. I was too excited about how fast I ate the cookie (30 seconds?) that I didn’t pay attention to the rest until we got the puzzle. Apparently we maintained our lead, but the puzzle for us is a lot more challenging than for the other residential halls as our symbol is so symmetrical. Another thing that did not help was that everyone was trying to help, but when you have too many people working in a small space that can be detrimental. Eventually we got it, and we ended up placing third overall

Because it looked like we got second, we were told to go onto the floor while they calculated the results. There was a lot of dancing. A loooooottttt of dancing. People were going pretty wild, but it was really fun. Then, after awhile and again before we were told about which house scored what, the rapper Common gave us an inspirational speech.

The speech, which had a nice message, was not well executed. It turns out Common had his hopes high numerous times and his expectations shot down. But he always had encouragement from other people and that helped him achieve his goals. “Find something you’d die for, and live for it.” If I am being completely honest though, he was not the most skilled speaker. People became bored as we sat on the uncomfortable floor for twenty minutes listening to this rapper half of us had not heard of and that was slowly losing our attention. He started strong with a freestyle, but then we all were just losing our attention as he grasped at odd anecdotes such as his alcoholic uncle who encouraged him and his teacher that told him he was better than he thought.

We eventually were all dismissed after all the rankings came out. Then we clogged traffic for another solid two minutes. I decided to head back because I was hella tired from all of that stuff. I needed to relax. One of the group chats on my phone asked “Anyone wanna play cards?” and I headed towards the fourth floor lounge of my dorm to try and play cards with a few people. This was my first time in the fourth floor lounge and it was like a castle! It is a beautiful place and if you are ever in IRC I suggest it for studying. The chairs are comfortable, the fireplace is relaxing, and the windows are huge. I met with a girl that we’ll call Novocaine. She is fairly cute with eyes so dark you could just stare into them for hours. No one really ever came to join us so we just awkwardly talked for awhile and eventually her family called her. They were in town for a few days staying with friends after they dropped her off at college. It’s cute, the bond she has with them. Novocaine grew up near my, and had moved all this way. But, things haven’t really picked up. The most intimate interaction was playing Uno the next day (this time with other friends) and we ended up giving each other all of the draw 2 cards and everyone there was just talking about random stuff. My suitemate who had finally shown up, Mario, joined myself, Elton John, and Novocaine for that. I’d gladly play uno with them again. Maybe some other time.

Oh! And to finish the night, when I got back to my room there were ten stoners. Singing the ballad of their kind. Some Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, some rap music, and they were just all laughing about the stupidest shit. It was entertaining to watch.

#myuscstory

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