#I still hate military wank games

[st-hedge]

Step 1: play mgs2 and have a laugh at how silly it is. Step 2: get struck weeks later with how sad that story was

[visceralcoma]

Hello. I would just like to start with the fact I have no real opinion on any of the factions, one way or another. But I did feel...gross? reading the comparison that was being made with Evelyn. Largely because it was unintentional. Like, there’s a visceral reaction caused by something done on purpose, for a purpose, and then a visceral reaction caused by something unintended. The second seems worse somehow, because not meaning to be callous about sexual assault and a victim of it comes across as that it wasn’t even something worth thinking about, or reflecting on in the first place. And she’s fictional, of course, but if fiction didn’t have such an impact on our emotions, her betrayal likely wouldn’t have inspired your original post.

Like, I’m sure that wasn’t your intention, but I do get why people had a negative reaction to it. It all felt very dismissive and harsh, and made to push a specific perspective, in the cruelest way possible.

Prefacing this by saying, I’m not angry at you nonnie. But my tone in this is one of exhaustion. I sat on this because I didn’t want to snap at you, and then well... idiots stormed the USA’s capitol and fandom shit is just petty when you’re watching a live coup attempt. So like this whole thing is just....

Anyway below the cut because it’s insanely long because I decided to put my college-educated-hat on and use my academic words so people aren’t offended (not aimed at you nonnie).

Warning: Fandom Wank Ahead, aka Coma up to their usual shit again~

I fail to see how my original post was even referencing sexual assault victims negatively. In fact my original post (that started the outrage) even states I held sympathy for Evelyn, because of the sexual assault she was victim to by Woodman and Fingers. 

My only criticisms were regarding her corporate leanings, behaving like a wannabe corpo (when she’s clearly not) and trying to get V to behave like a corpo(like her) to cut out their fixer. When the game makes it very clear why you should not fuck with Fixers, i.e.: every gig given to us that’s about getting back at a merc who botched a job, thus screwing over their fixer, or Rogue telling you why she doesn’t have a job for you because its suspicious due to your whole crew (Dex, T-bug. Jackie), dying.

I used crude language because the base metaphor is crude itself.  The base metaphor literally being “stop sucking the corporate cock”.  The only other metaphor that could have sufficed was bootlicker, but given it’s not a government, military, or strictly police organization she’s bending over backwards to support/be like, that metaphor didn’t fit. So i went with the corporate cock one instead, only left out the “cock” bit and leaned on cum guzzler for the same effect.

Now, it’s a huge assumption you, and others, are making that I hadn’t thought about how it would reflect on sexual assault victims, given I am one. As if that is an unfortunate thing about my past that I could ever forget for the rest of my existence. But treating all sexual assault victims and SWs like they cannot also be perpetrators of privilege due to their connections to corporate overlords, is a huge disservice.

Not to mention there is such a thing as intersectionality. And while Evelyn may be a sexual assault victim, SW, and a woman, she is also one enjoying immense monetary privilege due to her corporate connections and her pale skinned features. Such privileges that the VBDs, and especially Madam Brigitte (a black woman of immigrant status) do not have. Now I won’t make this about race because I don’t know what race Evelyn is (despite that I’m sure most people will default her to white), but I sure as fuck can make this about colorism and pale skin preferences.

Additionally, as a former SW still in contact with SWs across the globe, both former coworkers and new acquaintances- this is literally the sort of crude language we use to refer to ourselves and with each other - both in amicable/friendly situations and when insulting each other. Of course we do use more high brow “intellectual” language, but we don’t judge each other on which sort of language we use.  We certainly also don’t tone police when airing valid criticisms of someone’s flaws or issue-some behaviors, tendencies, actions, and privileges they enjoy. 

Now if you felt gross. That’s a valid reaction to have. Just as the ones who felt hurt by the words, which I did sincerely apologized (I used the phrase “I’m sorry I hurt you” both taking responsibility that I hurt them and not shifting the blame onto them but accepting it as my fault - but I also stated I wouldn’t change it because I don’t believe in removing evidence of mistakes.).  And if the person who had an issue with my criticism had simply said it was triggering language, I would have been more than happy to tag the post appropriately as “crude language” so they can filter it out. Hell it’s in my Before You Follow post as a practice (guess that person doesn’t take warnings seriously).  So that on top of my thoughts being under a read more so you’re not bombarded with it, it is also tagged with a blockable tag (which btw I did add the tag “crude language”, on top of originally posting it with evelyn critical).

And my proclamation on “it’s fictional”, is because... evelyn is fictional... why are you (not you nonnie, but that person) attacking a real person over what they think about a fictional character? Why are you attacking a real person over how they reacted to a fictional character?

If I had made my post and put a proclamation stating anyone who supported evelyn due to her actions was a bad person, this would be a different story. I would have earned the ire.  But I didn’t...because I wasn’t using my thoughts and my reaction to a fictional character to attack anyone, any of her fans, or any of her supporters. (Long time followers will know I fucking hate this practice in fandom spaces).

All I did was put out what my thoughts, completely unrelated to anyone real, on a post, with tags warning what it was about and that you could block, and under a read more. 

That’s like getting mad at reading noncon smut on ao3 because you failed to read the work was tagged with Explicit and Noncon.

Ridiculous.

As is this whole situation.

[supergenial]

Cindered Shadows was pretty decent

I recently finished the Cindered Shadows DLC and decided to once again write about my impressions, don't worry though, this one isn't as long as the previous ones. Spoilers: I think this is as good as fire emblem is gonna get for a while.

1) No Agarthans, thank GOD

A story as old as fire emblem: There's an interesting human villain with down to earth motivations or obsessions, but in the large scale of the story they're overshadowed by a supernatural being who wants to destroy the world for no reason other than "they're just evil". This is Edelgard and the Agarthans, Arvis and Manfroy/Loptous, Rudolph and Duma, Ashnard and Ashera, Walhart and Grima... you get it. This shit sucks to put it bluntly. Having these stereotypically evil bad guys who are clearly evil is one of the main things that brings down the plot of any fire emblem game. I'm of the belief that they should kick out these supernatural villains and just leave us against the human villains, the one's with actual ideals and beliefs other than "hurr durr, destroy the world".

And then there’s our villain for this DLC. Now yes, it feels like they recycled a certain professor from the Harry Potter series, but I like that he is "The" bad guy for the DLC, he's not being controlled by anyone. He's obsessed with Byleth's mom and in-game this makes a lot of sense. If Byleth, who is incapable of communication, can drive people crazy for them just by existing then just imagine a Byleth who can actually talk. Her "waifu" charms must be off the charts, so I can't blame this guy for being obsessed. More importantly he's not being controlled by the Agarthans, he's not being played by anyone. He's a man who's lived a righteous life, he took care of a lot of people who all love him but ultimately decided to use them for his own gain and his own obsessions. As far as FE villains go... He's good, honestly, great job Intelligent Systems, I expected a lot less.

2) Reduced avatar wanking

Shots fucking fired

Sure, Byleth's mom is a main focus of the plot, and Byleth is the one who sets the plot in motion, but rarely does it feel like the game is going "gee Player, you're so great, you're our god, we all love you and want to marry you". Byleth still plays a large role sure (unfortunately) but it still feels like this is the story of Yuri and his gang with Byleth being their strategist which is, idk, way better than the idea behind the main game? The one where Byleth turns into a literal god, gets every achievement of the army attributed to them only, has every other conversation remind us how glorious Byleth is, etc.

In fact the dlc goes as far as having Hapi constantly belittle Byleth and even make fun of their communication skills by calling him Chatterbox (good job to the localizers, she doesn’t say this in the japanese audio). Get that teacher’s ass girl, destroy them. (Obviously I would hate this behavior if it was directed to someone else, but in this case I'm willing to make a concession).

3) Yuri's backstory

Ashe: I admire and love this man who is my only parental figure but Rhea said he's kind of bad so I killed him Yuri: Church ordered me to kill a bunch of thieves and delinquents and I refused

You have no idea who much I love the fact that Yuri is someone who protested his orders and got kicked out of the church for refusing to kill civillians. This instantly sends him very high in my rankings. Playing through the first half of the game all I wanted was to stop and say "No, Lady Rhea, fuck you. I don't think it's very cash money for the most powerful military force in the continent to eradicate a lightly armed militia of farmers (with popular support in their locality!)" this is what true imperialism is all about! But there is sadly no option for that.

Just by telling us that Yuri is someone who was punished for saying "No, these orders are inhumane, I refuse to carry them out" that is enough for me, the game is saying "yes, we know, have your compensation price". In the end Yuri is extremely loyal to Rhea which is unfortunate but hey, at least they lampshaded one of the most glaring issues I have with the main game, so that's at least something.

4) "You've obtained all information. Proceed with the story, NOW"

Rather than wasting time forever thinking up which activity I should carry out, abyss is simply a place where you talk to the abyssal denizens to get some plot information or speculation, and boom, you're done. No running around forever, no quests, no doors that take ages to load. You can perfectly skip the abyss parts and at most you'll miss out on Edelgard's conversation with Dimiri (which is fucking hilarious) and a few rusted weapons that can be forged but that's it. Upon talking to every resident of the abyss the game will actually say you’ve acquired all information and will prompt you to go into combat rather than assume you want to dilly dally for a while.

I actually rather like this and would not be opposed to it being the philosophy behind future in-between segments between chapters. I can understand IntSys wanting to load in a ton of features like a sauna and fishing to rack up excitement for the game, I know I was excited for fishing, but when these activities have rewards tied to them, replaying becomes kind of a chore, "aw geez, I have to fish 69 fish to reach professor rank A+ AGAIN" (I actually had to when trying to get the piss screen from clearing maddening). Getting only some conversations and a bit of context for the story, that's... pretty good honestly, I liked this better than the monastery and better than My Castle. Throw in some skits with multiple characters at once and I’m gold

(seriously how come there’s no scenes with the three of the bros, Dimitri, Sylvain and Felix all hanging out together, the fact that a third character never shows up in support conversations is fucking bad)

5) Sometimes less is more

I've extensively complained about three houses already but bear with me. Yet another thing that infuriates me about the game is the extensive amount of work it required. I truly do think that if they had released only the blue lions route and left everything else in the plot as mysterious and unexplained loose ends left entirely up to speculation, that'd be a great game on it's own. Instead I have to see all the hard work that went into making the other routes only so that, in the end, they just had me going "well it was ok I guess". Every scene in the game requires work, many hours of coding, writing, voice acting, sound editing, making sure the models don't look too messed up, bug testing, etc. The amount of work that went into three houses was brutal regardless of what you think of the final product, yet a lot of people didn't even bother playing through all of that. So yes, I honestly wanted less, give me a more concise game rather than spreading too wide and ending up thin.

Cindered Shadows on the other hand is concise to a fault to make up for that. The story is pretty straightforward and leaves no loose ends to itself, there's no anime cutscenes, no supports (within abyss, you can support them all in the main game). There's even that very awkward sacrifice scene where some characters are having their life and blood drained from them yet the visual representation we see is just them standing around like normal, with Yuri even doing that hand pose he does all the time instead of squirming in pain or something. It's very awkward looking, objectively not good, but it gets the point across and doesn't make me go "wow you put in all this effort for nothing" because the whole thing is also fairly short (5 to 10 hours in hard mode).

I know, it sounds like I'm shitting on the dlc, but the point is I'd much rather get something short that leaves me satisfied than something like the main game that makes me go "this could've been so hecking gooood if they changed X" for the rest of my life.

6) The gameplay

Chapter 4 is my favorite mission in the whole game

They made Hard Mode good. I previously said maddening was the one difficulty where this game made sense, but this one achieves perfection with just hard mode. This is because the team actually knows what you have. In the main game there's all sorts of variables to account for due to the large amount of player expression that is possible, you can reclass anyone into anything and throughout many lucky or unlucky level ups, maps can be entirely different based on that rng and choices. Here though, your characters already have solid bases starting at lvl 20, and you can't reclass too much so the devs know exactly what you're working with and can plan accordingly. Beating the maps feels incredibly satisfying not just because the objectives have more variety now, but also because you feel like you found the right way to use the tools you were given. This is why the first few chapters of any fire emblem game often feel so good, because the devs know exactly what you have.

Not that I think player expression is bad! It's very satisfying to warp skip chapters and to use broken units like battalion vantage+wrath Dimitri as these things make you feel like you've truly subjugated the game, but it takes some time for those things to really take off. There's a time to reap and a time to sow, and the sowing time can get pretty dull sometimes but that's what makes the payoff feel worth it. Still, for a short experience like cindered shadows is, this style just fits perfectly, plus chapter 4 has quickly become one of my favorite chapters in the whole game, along with chapter 6.

7) In The End

Idk folks, I just like it. If you just want more adventures with the three lords, this is it.

If you’re looking for any excuses to avoid this I'd say the better ones are: maps are reused from the main game (they work much better here though), it's 10 hours at most so it's price-to-cash ratio isn't very good with the expansion pass being $30, and also the Abysskeeper feels a bit TOO winkwink nudgenudge to me, especially since Gatekeeper was popular enough to make it into Super Smash Brothers. Like yeah bro, we get it, we all love Gatekeeper, you didn't have to do this.

I also like that they finally gave Dimitri a semi-problematic quote where he says he kinda likes the idea of poor people living underground out of sight, I think it’s a very rich-white-boy flaw to have and not entirely awful given his life experience up to that point. And yes I do think he has no flaws and is entirely unproblematic in the main game, “feral” as he may look it doesn’t seem like he goes around killing civilians or doing anything other than busting up imperial troops which is kind of justified since they started the invasion, on top that he’s the strongest unit in the game and the most chill and honest ruler once he calms down, so little dent in his record that’s irrelevant in the large picture is indeed welcome.

Overall though, after being so massively disappointed by the Fates DLC, so much I didn't even bother with the ones for Echoes, I certainly like what I'm seeing here and that's a good sign, bravo Intsys.

[heartsyhawk]

The latest Dragon Age wank is making me itchy and annoyed. It always does but this one is just grinding my gears more than usual. 

So here is my long and probably gonna get me in some hot water personal take:

In the game’s actual canon, there is indisputably no completely ideologically “pure” main characters. They all do at least something you can argue as bad, insensitive, or problematic. Every single one. And that is what makes them relatable and real.

My very favorite characters from each piece of Dragon Age media fit the bill. So do yours. Harassing people about having a different favorite character than you, or a different ship than you, or a different favorite game, is pretty awful. And sending someone messages threatening or encouraging someone to end their life automatically makes the sender wrong, despicable, literally a criminal, and definitely not a good person.

That’s all I have to say about the character bit. As for the Chantry bit, people who have read codices and put in some pretty basic comprehension can generally agree it is not the force of Good and Love it pretends to be. My stance is unashamedly “Fuck the Chantry; it is Bad across the board. Anders was 100 percent right and justified in what he did about that.”

Obviously mages and elves have been the ones abused most severely and frequently. I don’t think anyone reasonable is going to deny that. Certainly anyone who has actually read codices or paid attention cannot and would not deny what has happened in the game canon. But they aren’t the only victims in the Chantry’s ledger.

People pointing that out is what started this newest round of asshattery. And nobody was saying that Templars are treated worse than elves or mages, well Cassandra or Cullen might, and kind of did, to be entirely reasonable and canon. But that is not what the main people who ended up getting death threats and shit were saying. What they were saying got massively twisted and ignored and vilified and honestly I’ve been literally sick about the whole thing. 

A whole lot about the Templars is seriously fucked up. Everything the Chantry has them do is cruel and horrifying. Most of it actually seems like it would fit the definition of war crimes under the Geneva convention. To say nothing of the whole forced and arguably unnecessary addiction thing.

A lot of Templars do extremely cruel and horrifying things even beyond the basic reaches of the Chantry’s orders. That is also undeniable. They have sadists and rapists and even the “good” ones are often abusive beyond the way they are “supposed” to be. I just replayed 2 and the way you meet Cullen there is extremely ugly and he doesn’t have the “I’ve literally until this second been being tortured by demons” excuse to justify the way he is treating people–the kind of people he actually considers people, for the record–he had in Origins.

But I don’t think it is impossible to acknowledge these things as true and still feel some sympathy for individual Templars sometimes. They aren’t all, cannot all, be like Cullen, who volunteered young and wanted that life. Especially since our very first introduction to the Templar order’s recruitment process is Alistair, who never ever wanted it and hated everything about it and only managed to escape when Duncan used the rite of conscription which the grand cleric couldn’t fight.

I’ve seen a lot of “well mages and elves are born that way and Templars aren’t”. We have seen that Templars don’t actually always have a lot of choice in the matter. Some of them are recruited out of Chantry orphanages (horrifyingly where the Chantry puts Circle Mage babies to keep an eye on them, for the extra awful record). Some of them are from very poor families from little villages with virtually no other means of supporting themselves or their family. It reminds me a lot of how the military works.

I don’t actually know if it’s the same throughout the whole world, but the US military is blatantly extremely predatory in it’s recruitment and notoriously shitty and abusive to it’s recruits. I fully hate the military as an institution, for what it does to people both in and out of it’s ranks and what it does to the world at large. I loathe the culture of brainwashed military worship. I don’t believe in glorifying or justifying what the military does. But it does not undermine that to feel sympathy for the way individual soldiers and former soldiers are treated. It is fully possible to hate what the military stands for, what the people in it actually do, and simultaneously understand the circumstances that led an individual there and feel badly for them. It is not praising the military or silencing it’s many victims to acknowledge it is a terrifying shit move to recruit out of schools, especially in low income neighborhoods with a high minority population, by promising opportunities otherwise unavailable. It isn’t denying or discrediting the horrible things the military has done to be horrified by the way soldiers are treated after they are no longer considered whole and useful. It isn’t somehow hand waving the atrocities committed to talk about how a lot of people who rise quickly through the ranks take advantage of their position of power over the people beneath them.

It is absolutely the same with the Templar Order. It is shit as an institution. It is a powerful military arm of an imperialist superpower. It pretty much only exists to commit atrocities sprinkled in with some good PR and hero worship from the people running things. Everything they stand for is horrible and “just following orders” is not really enough to justify the things they do in many cases. And yet. Life is never so black and white as fandom likes to make it.

I have not been targeted by any of the toxic wank, this round. I barely register on most people’s radar in this fandom probably. I’m glad. I don’t think I could handle it if I got the constant harassment that some people are getting right now. And nobody should have to get it. 

I cannot believe it must be said that threatening people, telling them to kill themselves is bad. I cannot believe there are people that literally have no goddamn idea why that’s not acceptable behavior. This is supposed to be a fandom for a game rated mature, and this website is listed as mature 17+ in the app store. And there is a large chunk of this fandom definitely not acting it. Between callout posts going around demanding the blacklisting of people for engaging with the material in a way they don’t explicitly agree with, shipping drama, the Anders Discourse, and now this new nonsense where you’re only allowed to care for the “right kind of” suffering or what it is getting more and more exhausting. 

It isn’t just a Dragon Age thing, I know that. Other fandoms have the same kinds of viciousness. But if I wanted to watch batshit bloodthirsty attacks on people for things that seem like common sense non issues to me I would start going to Family Reunions for my Dad’s side of the family again. I wish we could do better, all of us.

Life outside of the internet is tough and stressful. When I found fandom as a tiny child it was an escape. It was supposed to be fun. On the outside it seems like a group of people ostensibly with fairly similar interests celebrating that. And somewhere along the way it’s become a hate fest and a weird morality competition. I don’t know where people find the energy to dedicate to being a giant sack of dicks to other people. I’ve had to take two rests to actually type this out and in a few minutes I have to bundle up to shovel tenish inches of very wet heavy snow from my sidewalk and driveway and I’m just so exhausted by the way people treat eachother and the fact that it keeps happening at all. This is kindergarten level golden rule stuff. It should be easy

TL;DR Please don’t be a sack of trash to other people it is stressful and cruel and stupid and nobody is having any fun.