#I feel like a flashback would be good

[k-martins]

Spoilers Chapter 237

Kashimo: You took everything from me! Sukuna: I don't even know who you are.

[hinamie]

to moving forward

[helluvahotmess]

'I want you to continue to be who you are.' what if i fucking died what then

[chirpsythismorning]

S5 opener REAL

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

A Dark and Drowning Tide

gothic fantasy romance

a folklorist is chosen as the co-leader of an expedition to find a fabled magical spring for the king, along with 6 nobles

when her mentor, the other leader, is found dead on their boat in the middle of the night, she has to figure out who did it; while continuing the mission through the wilderness and navigating the potential political fallout

and the only one she can probably trust is her academic rival, a naturalist, who she hates

dark folktales & creatures

Jewish lesbian MC

arc from netgalley! out sep 17

putting both covers here because they’re both so beautiful!! (artists: Audrey Benjaminsen, & Erica Williams)

[lolabearwrites]

My happy, ideal ending: the star-touched elves become the final boss of the series and the gang team up with Aaravos to take them down (somehow) then Aaravos can bring Leola back with the last quasar diamond, and they can go back to the stars happily ever after

[w1tchybusiness]

i could write a 100 page essay about what a fucking masterpiece warframe is. i will write many words in the tags. please readem if you want my 'tism.

[hauntingblue]

Oden's prophecy of young pirates coming to save wano becoming yamato's hope for his freedom.... and him becoming oden because of it.... it's just so good... on the other side luffy taking ace's spot for liberating yamato... I think I hauve covid

[tsubasale]

Even if you have no one, I want you to shout if you want something to change. Friends and enemies walk amongst each other, and all you can do is shout for what you want!

[thedrotter]

not-yet-dead-person

silly comic of a conversation in-game i thought was too funny not to make something proper for instead of a doodle ww

(timelapse + wip images (thus silly process commentary in read more if you like artist commentary :3)

i think the sketch looks silly and goofy and funny so i find it important to share with you the mere presence of the faces i drew on it. i drew it on top of the boxes without staying inside its borders because i find my proportions can get wonky if i draw them cropped in a restricted space. and I feel trapped otherwise and i will draw BAD!!! give me spaceeeee to go wild!!!!

the head circles are there for emotional support

very low res speedpaint because truth is the canvas was much bigger than the space where my comic was placed. i didnt account when exporting my timelapse in 720px that that tiny space would look so pixelated ... but it's able to be percieved, so its okay.

(i will now comment on my process and it is not brief sorry)

usually i would try to clean up my sketches and figure out what goes on top before jumping into linework, but since there are multiple panels and drawings i chose to jump into inking right away for the sake of brevity. i just went in with a brush that uses pen pressure and drew what was needed. i added extra line thickness and contrast in areas around the face because it helps direct your eyes there more easily that way.

according to her equipment rei has a chain belt but i only remembered it existed once I was going to color, and i did not like that discovery... I chose to ignore it to maintain my peace. i already have the color palettes for these characters figured out, and i didnt really want to think about a new element at the moment www I tend to overthink those things a lot so i skipped it

the rest is rather straightforward! not that anything else wasn't, but in here i could turn my brain off and sing. linework and sketching require mumbling so i cannot turn my brain off. just block in the characters with a solid color so i can have a mask (something along those lines,) where the color can stay inside. then just color in !!!

Base colors just had slight cell shading on the skin, and for the hair i airbrush a bit of the skincolor in low opacity near the forehead... I'm not sure what it means, but i can look at the faces easier with it somehow. i like the gentle subtlety it adds even if you cant really tell. it makes things look nice.

background was just me blocking in the color of the wall and floor, shade the wall a bit, then slap a noise and free use wood texture on top. work smarter not harder ! yet it took a bit to make it look stylistically fitting with the characters, and even now i think bottom middle panel looks odd. whatever!!!

for the middle panel i thought itd be funny if the background was a solid silly and colorful one to contrast the next panel's sketchy black one. a contrast to how the word widow is seen. on that note my handwritting is not pointy. i gaslighted my hand into thinking that it was indeed pointy in that moment so i could write "not-yet dead person" in letters that didn't seem cute. my hand did not fall for it but it complied anyway

that's basically it! I'm not sure what else i could say that doesn't feel barebones because it really is that straightforward. if you're curious I used clip studio paint for this. only special brush used was for linework (a brush named Lemon Brush), the rest used were just the default. my computer gets the least credit. it was trying to convince me a 20mb file was going to nuke it all the time and hardly let me save multiple times so i do not appreciate it

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 6!!!

[moongothic]

I love the crocodad theory a lot but I fear that the fandom will start misgendering him or respect the character less because of transphobia.

Oda have written queer characters before who are respected by the fandom such as Bonclay but for Crocodile its another story. He is their alpha male badass character and adding queerness to his character might make them mad. Not that I care about those bigots feelings but its already not easy to navigate this fandom without queerphobia being thrown in your face.

Ppl can digest a queer character who fit in the stereotypes but once they dont, its another story.

Same, people are weird as fucking hell and gross about Crocodile maybe being trans already, we can be sure it would get worse if him being trans was confirmed in the story, there would be absolutely no avoiding it

But at the same time...

Transphobes are gonna be transphobes regardless, and I don't want that to become a reason for any storyteller to not create trans characters. I don't want Oda to bend over backwards to please the transphobes when they're the ones in the wrong. If anything, I want Oda to just go all the way with the message of queer liberation and freedom in One Piece. Like it's not perfect, but it's already there, but it's so subtle many queerphobes have been able to ignore it this whole time and I don't want Oda to let them ignore it anymore. I want him to rub it into their faces so hard they'll start complaining about "Oda going woke"

And like, let's be real. If Crocodile was trans and Oda pulled it off just right (without falling into certain pitfalls that he's be stumbling with this whole time with queer rep), that could unironically be like. Great not just trans rep but trans masc rep in particular

Like maybe it's just the media I've consumed but trans masc rep is typically very non-existant and/or very much like Yamato, who, while valid as hell, might not be how many trans masc people want to be seen as by others (as in, "confused girls")

We've known Crocodile as a character for 23 years at this point, and for the first 8-9 years of that he was very much seen as A Manly Cis Man (like you said) without a hint of a doubt (until Impel Down). If it turned out he had been trans this whole time, that would force people to rethink how they view trans people.

As just regular fucking people

That person you knew for years turned out to be trans? So what? What does that actually change about them? It's still the same person deep down. Those are the things Oda could force people to think about.

And honestly? If that helped convert even just a single transphobe, or educate someone without an opinion on trans people, to just letting trans people live their lives in peace, I think it'd be worth it

But like, yeah. The transphobes are gonna be loud regardless. It fucking sucks, and I hate the fandom for it. But, damned if you do, damned if you don't, there's no avoiding it. And I think the potential positive impact would outweight the already festering negativity.

[crehador]

can i be real i feel like high card would have been more compelling if they'd introduced the old man yaoi element sooner. like the twinks they've got running around are fine and all but king is hilarious and whatever toxic mess theodore and ban have going on is deeply intriguing. to me

[thats-my-passion-right-there]

I finally saw the mean girls musical (the movie one) I have so many fucking thoughts oh my god

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

So Witches We Became

YA horror

a girl and her friends go on vacation to a house on a private Florida island, but when a strange mist and toxic tar surrounds them, trapping them there, they have to find a way to survive and/or escape

while she’s being haunted by a traumatic experience with her friend’s boyfriend - who just showed up - that she’s been unable to tell anyone about, and by a shadow from her childhood that she fears might have something to do with what’s happening

sapphic, explores complicated friendships, and surviving assault

[arosnowflake]

By far the biggest flaw in BOTW's storytelling is its distribution of information. Its poor utilization of the flashbacks single-handedly turns a story that easily could've been great into one that's barely mediocre.

When creating a story, you need to decide 1) what information you want to put in it, and 2) where you want to put that information. Your choices can make or break your story on a fundamental level. Example one: if your story hinges on deconstructing a complex magic system, but then fails to explain this magic system to the audience, your story will completely fall apart. Example two: if you decide to open your story with a plot twist that'll be revealed halfway through, and then still try to pretend like the audience doesn't know what'll happen, your story will be very poorly received by an annoyed audience. However, if you reveal this twist and then utilize it as a sword of Damocles hanging over the characters' heads as they inch ever closer to it, it can create a unique tension. Which information you reveal and how you reveal it is a foundational aspect of storytelling.

BOTW, being an open world video game, can't really create a traditional linear story structure. Its information distribution is different than that of a movie, book, or even linear video game. BOTW has five avenues to distribute information: 1) main story cutscenes, 2) flashbacks, 3) NPC dialogue, 4) environmental storytelling, and 5) infodumps scattered throughout the world.

The first three speak for themselves, I don't feel like I have to explain them. With 'infodumps scattered around the world' I mean things like the Zora plaques and the diaries you can find; things you have to stop and read out in the world. I define 'environmental storytelling' primarily as location design; for example, the Guardian graveyard around Fort Hateno speaks to a fierce battle that then suddenly ended as Guardians failed to advance, information you can gather just from looking at it well before anyone tells you this. I distinguish this from NPC dialogue and infodumps because it's a completely wordless method of distributing information that essentially every person who plays the game will pick up on, regardless of whether they go out of their way to gather it or not.

Between these methods of distribution, main story cutscenes and environmental storytelling are the most reliable ways to distribute information. Your average player can be expected to watch at least most of the main story cutscenes, and since BOTW is a game about exploring, nearly all players will be exposed to environmental storytelling. Flashbacks are semi-reliable, in that most players can be expected to get at least a few of them, though a lot will probably not go out of their way to gather all. Lore dumps in the form of NPC dialogue and books/plaques/magazines/etc. are the least reliable, as a good chunk of players is simply not going to care about the story enough to read and seek them out.

The main story cutscenes do a fine job at explaining the basic story to the player and providing a bit of pathos for the Champions, which is their main job. I don't have much to say about them. But the real story of Breath of the Wild isn't really about calming the Divine Beasts and defeating Calamity Ganon; it's about what happened a hundred years ago. The story in the present matters, but is only a small percentage of the real picture.

The story of a hundred years ago lies primarily in the flashbacks, of which there are eightteen. Information is also distributed through certain diaries (most notably Rhoam and Zelda's), environmental storytelling, and NPC dialogue (mainly through Impa and some Zora NPCs). It is significantly more difficult to tell the story of the past than of the present, both because it's a lot more complex, and because there are fewer avenues to do so. As such, you need to be especially careful chosing what information you give where; flashbacks are the most complete way to distribute information, but environmental storytelling is the most universal. What information do you want most players to know, and what information is only really relevant to those already interested in the story? How do you maximize the information players receive?

This is where Breath of the Wild's story ultimately falls apart. It does a tremendously poor job recognizing what parts of the story are complex and important enough to be put in the flashbacks, and which information should instead be given through books and dialogue. It does not utilize the environmental storytelling to its full potential, either, though I won't be getting too much into that because it's the least egregious issue and this is already gonna be like a ten page essay. Instead, I'll focus on the flashbacks and, to a lesser extent, the books and dialogue.

First, to successfully write a story like this, you have to identify what information to put in the flashbacks, and what information you can give via environmental storytelling, books, or dialogue. Impa is capable of telling you about basic plot information from a hundred years ago, the Zora NPCs cover Mipha and some of Link's personal life, and the books give a more direct insight into Zelda and Rhoam's thoughts. However, these extra diaries will only be read by players already interested in the lore, so they should contain information that adds to what has already been established in the flashbacks; load-bearing information that the player needs to know should be present instead in the flashbacks and, where possible, environmental storytelling.

The flashbacks are structured as eighteen different scenes that should be able to stand alone, because they might be viewed in any order. Most of the scenes are dedicated to Zelda, which is a decent choice; you will gain information on the Champions through dialogue and the main story cutscenes, so they are less of a priority. It is harder to gather much meaningful information about Zelda through those, so prioritizing her in the flashbacks is a natural choice. That said, the few flashbacks we have of the Champions should absolutely provide information that couldn't have been gained from present day dialogue/cutscenes, especially seeing as there's only one for each. Likewise, information about Zelda already given via the flashbacks does not need to be repeated in books, since players who sit down to read those can be reasonably presumed to have either gathered all flashbacks already or be interested in doing so.

So, to summarize: the job of the flashbacks is to contain important information the player couldn't gather via dialogue or other present day infodumps. Things like characterization of Zelda, private scenes between Zelda and Link, and characterization details for the Champions should be prioritized here.

Important also: there are eighteen scenes. There is a hard limit on what information you can put in the flashbacks. When you have this few scenes to tell a story, you need to be ruthless in your prioritization of information. You need to put the most interesting, most important, most complex information in the flashbacks, and spread the rest through books and dialogue.

So. Why is there a flashback dedicated to showing monsters are acting up in the lead-up to Calamity Ganon's return? Like. That could've been an email, or, you know a diary entry. The only other thing the Eldin flashback provides is the knowledge that Zelda and Link are friends, that Zelda cares for Link, and that Link can be reckless when fighting. The first two are things we can see just as if not more clearly in other flashbacks, and the last is something that easily could've been put in the diary entry. Furthermore, 'monsters are acting up in the lead-up to Calamity Ganon's return' is information we could (and probably did) easily gather ourselves from seeing how the monsters are acting in the present day, with NPC dialogue informing us they are unusually active and Calamity Ganon having a clear direct effect on them via the Blood Moon. This information would've been nice flavoring in a diary entry; as a memory slot, it's wasting precious time and actively undercuts the story by doing so. This memory slot could've been used to show important information; instead, it's a complete waste of time.

This is just one example; Breath of the Wild is littered with memories that do little more than either repeat information established elsewhere or outright waste time, at best giving us irrelevant information, and at worst giving us nothing at all. Particularly egregious examples are the Mipha flashback, which does not provide us with any new information about her aside from maybe her healing, which is information that should've absolutely been previously established via dialogue instead and is established via other means elsewhere; the Kara Kara Bazaar flashback, which gives so little information as to be near useless (especially when this information is then later repeated in Zelda's diary for some reason) yet is still placed in such a way as to be basically unmissable and covers a load-bearing point in the story; and the one where Zelda reads off a travel itinerary, talks about basic Divine Beast facts we already know, and cuts out right at the point where we start to get into anything actually interesting.

Not all flashbacks are bad; some are mediocre, and some are outright great. But far too many flashbacks waste time repeating information or giving far too little, which eats away at the precious few scenes BOTW has to tell its story. I would consider the four scenes I just mentioned to be completely useless; memories tree and eight (travel itinerary and Eldin respectively) are useless to the point where you could outright cut them without missing anything real, and the other two are poorly written to the point where they are wasting space despite having an important part in the story.

However, I would only consider nine of the memories to be genuinely well-written, if I'm being generous (eight if I'm not, the swing vote being memory one). These are memories eleven through eighteen minus fourteen, multiple of which give important plot information that couldn't have been as effectively given in others ways, all of which provide characterization and/or additional context to plot events that couldn't have been given through other means. Also included is the frog memory, which contains no plot information, but shows what Zelda is like when she isn't stressed, an important part of characterization that, again, couldn't have been established nearly as effectively elsewhere. Memory one is very interesting in a lot of ways, but I feel like it's not as strong as the others and could've used a little more meat on its bones (for example: what does Mipha think of all this?). Ultimately, though, I do think it's interesting enough to be considered above average.

The rest of the memories are middling, basically passable to the point where I don't think the game would've necessarily been better off without them, but still ultimately not doing a great job telling the story. These are the memories that do give important information that couldn't be (effectively) given elsewhere, but that I don't feel utilize their time well. They are not very interesting and do not give enough information to justify their inclusion in the game as-is; they should've been rewritten to make better use of their time and provide more information. In a word: they're underwhelming. These are most of the Champion memories, where they simply give too little information about the Champions to be truly all that interesting to me; I feel like with some rewriting you could've made much better use of the one memory slot each Champion has. The last one in this category in memory fourteen, which does provide plot information and some characterization for Zelda and to a lesser extent Link, but ultimately feels more like a stopgap before the final act than anything else. Like, it's fine. I feel like you could've come up with a more interesting scenario with which to convey this information though. Which is basically my opinion on all these memories: they're fine, but could've used another pass.

(Memory five is one I'm not confident in placing; it does provide quite a bit of important information but I don't think it does so in a particularly interesting way; at the same time, I also don't think it's so weak that it strictly needed to be rewritten. So. Probably middling but in a less negative way than the others.)

We can twist and argue on the exact specifics on which memory should be included where, but I think that even with the most generous interpretation, it's difficult to argue against the estimation that there that about 25% to 50% of the memories included in Breath of the Wild do not do a good job telling their story. Seeing as the memories are the primary mechanism by which the story is told, that's. Bad. If 25% to 50% of your scenes are either bad or underwhelming, you don't have a very good story.

The issues don't stop at the memories. They also pop up in Zelda's diary, one of the other most important methods of information distribution. The third entry is about memory five and does not give meaningful insight on it, since memory five was already in Zelda's point of view and it was very easy to follow her thought process. The only new information is that she feels guilty about it. This is a waste of a dairy entry; we've already received most of this information, and the rest is not interesting enough to be worth its inclusion. Entry four is about the Kara Kara Bazaar flashback (or, you know, it would be if the flashback scene wasn't so weak), and similarly wastes an entry in its inclusion, since you're all but guaranteed to have gotten this memory by the time you read the diary and it doesn't really give much meaningful insight into Zelda's thought process (I mean. Still more than the actual memory. But come on now). Both of these are important for a narrative flow to the diary, I guess, but could've easily been incorporated into other entries with a sentence or two.

For example, while entry six also retells a memory, it does so in a few sentences, and spends the rest of its time providing insight into Zelda's thoughts on her mother and how those intertwine with her thoughts around her power and her failure to connect with it. This is a much more effective usage of the diary, providing extra information that's not essential to the story, but interesting to know for people who care. People who are sitting down to read the diary are people who care about the story; they'll have almost certainly either gotten the memories at this point, or be planning on getting them. You don't need whole entries dedicated to retelling the memories. They'll find them eventually, if they haven't yet. Instead, use the time more wisely by providing this extra flavor that deepens the story as a whole, rather than laying its basic foundations. That's the memories' job.

The other entries mostly do a pretty good job; the diary isn't the main issue with the story. However, there is one other entry that stands out to me: entry five, which describes Zelda and Link's first real bonding conversation. This is where the story gets kind of kneecapped by the game's insistence on keeping Link as a blank slate first and a character second. The writing correctly identified anyone who'd sit down to read Zelda's diary as someone who would like or at least wouldn't mind deeper Link characterization, but didn't want to risk alienating any players by putting more than vague hints towards characterization in the main memories. Link's lack of characterization is a separate issue from information distribution that only really hurts the story on two occasions (this one and the itinerary memory); I won't be getting into it here (again. the post is long enough), but I'm noting it because the information in this entry is far better suited to a memory. This is an important turning point in Link and Zelda's relationship, a foundational aspect of the story, not merely flavor text. The Kara Kara Bazaar memory, in part due to how bare bones it is, does not do a good job bearing the weight of this turning point. If you just watch the memories, the transition between Zelda disliking Link and them becoming good friends feels very sudden. The scene the entry describes is full of extremely interesting information that would make for a good flashback scene; however, most of it is about Link, and it would require giving him stronger characterization than the game was willing to commit to. Entry five is a good example of flavor text that should've, by all rights, been in the main story; however, its exclusion was deliberate. In my opinion, it still counts as an information distribution issue, but it isn't purely one.

So we have memories that should've been diary entries, diary entries that should've been memories, diary entries that should've been rewritten, memories that should've been rewritten because they provide so little information as to be either outright worthless or underwhelming, and memories that could've just been straight-out cut.

And here's the reason all of this matters: these things take up time. They take up valuable space in the narrative that could've been spent on things that were far more interesting. The foundation of Breath of the Wild's story, that of Zelda conflicting with her destiny and of a people doomed to tragedy due to a blind reliance on the past, is very strong. But in practice, it doesn't end up doing much of anything interesting with it.

Its characterization of the Champions is bare bones, with not enough information provided in the world to make up for the mediocre memories. Zelda's characterization is deeper and more interesting, but a lot of time that could've been spent flashing it out further instead goes to wasting time or repeating information established elsewhere. It never goes further than base elements you'd logically expect from this type of story set-up, and I don't believe that's because there wasn't anything interesting to do; look at the diary entry talking about Zelda's strange dream about a glowing woman. Is it Hylia? Is it Zelda having a prophetic dream about her own future? Is it something else? This is something you could easily mine and do something very interesting with. The summary describes memory three (the itinerary one) as Zelda 'interrogating Link, after which the pain she's held inside surfaces' (paraphrasing, I play the game in Dutch and am translating), which is wildly overstating what actually happens because the memory cuts off before it can do anything interesting. Part of that is the previously stated desire to keep Link a blank slate, but if that's what you want to do, why structure a precious memory slot around a scene you know is doomed to go nowhere? If you used this slot to actually have Zelda talk about how Hyrule views the Master Sword and what her own relationship is to it, you'd actually have an interesting memory and a more developed world and character to boot; perhaps you could even foreshadow the part in memory seventeen where Zelda knows Link's alive because the Master Sword still glows. Do you see what I mean? Time that's now wasted could've been used to provide much more interesting information that would deepen the story as a whole.

The fact is that Breath of the Wild spends too much time on far too little. It did a poor job understanding what information should go where, prioritizing unimportant, underwhelming, or repeating information for memory slots when they already had so few of them. The result is a story that is infuriatingly mediocre despite its potential.