#ITS JUST SUCH A MAJOR DISSERVICE TO GAME'S THEMES AS A WHOLE !!!

[bonefall]

So, your Clear Sky post is absolutely horrifying, but it was very needed, so thank you. What are your general thoughts on tackling his abuse for the AU? Like you've said, pretending he's a good guy is not the way to go, but are you planning on toning down *some* of the situations, just to give some of the cats a break? Clear Sky is a very realistic depiction of abusers, but that seems to come across even without victim number 25, yknow? I'm very curious about how you'd like to go about this.

My most recent big change was bringing Slash back into the fold, because I realized that it was actually a disservice to not address where DOTC's themes dip into Colonialism. It's a hard topic, and I'm still trying to work out the details, but I realized it was important.

With how BB!DOTC is such a MASSIVE overhaul, to properly address abuse and the ways it impacts you, ableism and its violence, and xenophobia broadly, a huge reworking of Slash belonged here too. He's one of the greatest examples of how badly WC demonizes non-Clanborn cats. I shouldn't dance around it.

That's what I need to do with Skystar.

MANY of his victims have happier endings than canon, though. Bumble is one of the most famous, bumped up into a major character and directly responsible for the formation of ThunderClan. Bright Storm is taking most of Gray Wing's roles. Birch and Alder are getting examined, with either a father who wants his kids back or Milkweed as the mate of Misty.

A lot of people will die because of him, even more will be hurt, but I see BB!DOTC as a story about victims and survivors.

Others might grab POVs here and there, but as a response to canon which I feel is Clear Sky's story told in many parts, I center this rewrite around Thunder Storm. The path of kindness he marches down, with love and with anger, and the people he helps.

So BB!Star Flower...

Previously I was playing her as ENTIRELY just manipulating Clear Sky. She was loyal to One Eye and trying to get at Skystar to bleed him dry for 8 lives to sacrifice; but connected to Thunderstar over recognizing him as a victim who deserves her idea of justice. So, she offers Thunderstar the final kill, so her father will be grateful to him and he'll get power AND the death of his abuser.

(When Thunderstar looks upon Skystar, pathetic and neutralized down to one life, he thinks about the collateral damage that will descend upon the forest if he accepts the deal. He decides that he has found the line between Justice and Justification. Of course he wants the power to make his enemies cower, protect his people, and eliminate Clear Sky so he never threatens them again; that's not the problem.

He can still do these things. He wouldn't NEED the power of a war god to do so.

But if One Eye returns, he will be endlessly hungry, ruthlessly dedicated to revenge, and set out to devour the whole forest. Everything would get worse, and even more people he loves would die. It's where his desire to destroy a monster would lead to him BECOMING one.)

Even on its face, it was previously missing an element. There's a step between "Starf decides to bring One Eye back" and "Starf offers Thunderstar the final kill" that was bare. This is the piece that was missing-- That she, herself, is trying to reach out to the only person who's ever really understood her.

But more importantly... I do feel this topic belongs here, in BB!DOTC. Abuse is a MAJOR theme. SKYSTAR is a monster already. He's harmed two wives in BB (Bright Storm and Falling Cry) and played toxic games with all three kits (Thunder Storm, Pale Sky, Tiger Sky).

And I'd avoid Star Flower being abused... why? Because it's uncomfortable to confront the pattern that Clear Sky displays? That in-canon, he tries to cut all his victims into the same ideal shape, from Storm to Thunder to Star Flower? ...it should be uncomfortable. Everything that I described in Clear Sky Is A Monster is rooted in the same desire for control, power, and punishment most abusive people share, he just happens to be a severe example.

Yes. That includes how he treats his child and romantic partners. The parallels that are drawn between Starf and Thunder are there because he wants power in the form of obedience. Starf replaces the son as a narrative award for his "growth" of not killing random people anymore for a while.

A cookie cutter is an effective tool because IT ONLY MAKES ONE SHAPE.

You know what's more uncomfortable? Reading canon!DOTC and seeing someone who hurt you reflected almost perfectly in the character the writers think did nothing wrong. Because of "good intentions" that were not there.

I will say though, just to be clear; I don't see a purpose in being more than PG-13 about serious topics for this project. I promise none of my intentions have changed. Nothing will be more graphic or gorey than canon WC-- just more intentional.

I'm keeping the sacrifice because it's dope. No one is taking this from me. Girl Moment: Killed her awful husband 8 times to count as 8 sacrifices and offered the last life to her buddy as a show of good will. How else do you make friends outside of high school

But I know now that Star Flower NEEDS to keep the canon fact she has very little agency, UNTIL that moment she snaps.

She's sacrificing one abuser to try and bring back a bigger, badder one, because in spite of everything, her father One Eye always made her feel safe. Even though he promised her off to Skystar, and expected her to be willing to die for him. She's followed every command, every order, past the death of his mortal vessel.

The first, and only, selfish choice she's ever made was in reaching out to Thunderstar to offer him the power of her father.

Thunderstar's Justice is a story about a Thunder Storm at the pinnacle of his arc, how the survivors of his Clan are settling into the new normal after the carnage of The First Battle, how Skystar's arrogance brings a violent god to the Forest... and the connection Thunderstar makes with the daughter of a monster.

[beatcroc]

Do u think u could elaborate a lil about btb and pizza tower lore?? Thank u

oh god i'm not the most well-read on either BUT uh. spoilers for both medias i guess.....i need to stress that these should NOT be seen as like dramatic edgy series because of what's going on under the hood though, that's not the point of them or what they focus on, and it'd be a huge disservice to think of them as 'taking themselves too seriously' type things for this, haha.

EDIT: it's been a bit since i made this post and in looking around since then i've discovered i might've gotten the wrong impression about some of the pizza tower stuff. i intended to only mention what was fact/hard canon here, but some might be extrapolated anyway, so take it with a pinch of salt.

---

bigtop burger is, for all intents and purposes, a chill and lighthearted series of animated shorts about a bunch of college kids who work at a clown-themed food truck. their clown boss is more than a little strange and suspicious but they're content to let it slide because he's generally friendly and well-meaning; and again, the series is only really About the kids and their day to day lives, and the wacky cartoon antics that may occasionally come with that. such as, say, watching their boss slice a truck in two with a katana. it's a little weird for sure but we don't question it.

they have a rival burger truck, zomburger, which is zombie themed, and led by a guy who is defintiely totally not actually undead. the kids this guy employs are pretty into the whole gimmick [because theyre theater majors and "get paid like thousands of dollars per hour" <-presented as the most bizzare thing that's happened], and so have no issue doing things like firing cannons at our clown-thmed protags during a highway chase. their boss has some kind of serious beef with the clown boss, but that's their problem. the kids are chill with eachother.

what they're Not telling you is that the clowns and undead have some kind of ancient feud [possibly even a war???] going on, and zombie guy was apparently[?] only using the food truck thing as a ruse to get at clown guy. both types of guys are insanely powerful and it's heavily implied that neither of them should be mingling with normal humans in the first place, which is why the food trucks and the other employees have their respective gimmicks as cover. also magic of some kind seems to be real, with illusory and portal-type stuff seen so far.

there is a possible implication that clowns are Actually Dangerous and the zombie guy's hunting them is like warranted, but given this unrelated short by the creator apparently set in the same universe, i'd like to more confidently say that it's just zombie guy being an asshole assassin type and they're both high-ranking freaks duking it out in public which is like the worst place possible given their general disinterest in hurting anyone else.

aside: bigtop's lore is a lot more plainly-presented and actually meaningful to the series and the character dynamics, but as it is currently it's nothing more than a backdrop for The Hijinx to play off of so they still never really say anything too direct about it or have characters respond to it. [that said, the most recent episode could easily be considered a turning point so we'll see how things go from here]

----

pizza tower is, for all intents and purposes, just a funny 2d platformer game where lots of silly things happen to its really excitable protagonist and you get tons of endlessly amusing expressions and animation out of it. it feels somewhat like a playable 90's cartoon, and this is its primary charm. again, you aren't supposed to really question the framing of everything. that'd be like asking why bowser is a fire-breathing turtle. because he is. that's just how it works who gives a shit. pizza tower has you kill a big pillar guy halfway through a given level and then you have to get the hell out on a timer before it all collapses, and there's a funny little janitor guy you can get as a bonus pickup to help you out in each level. each floor of the tower has a different Theme for its set of levels. traditional game stuff. you get to the top of the pizza tower and beat up the jackass pizza guy that threatened to blow up your own pizzeria. [there's more to the gameplay than that but this is just what's lore-relevant]

what the game slides under the radar with its completely-dialogue-less style is that the big pillar guy more or less IS the tower, pillar and janitor were the original residents of the tower before it got turned into the pizza tower [yeah.], and the little janitor guy, who is pillar's brother, is generally fine with helping you destroy the place because for the past [amount of time] he's been fighting a losing battle of helping keep his bro intact in the wake of it being taken over by the jackass pizza guy, who has pretty much defiled it beyond repair for his own amusement since finding it. pizza guy cloned pillar guy a bunch of times and split his consciousness between the duplicates and made them all keep all the portals to the pocket dimensions in the tower [the levels] open. pillar guy's original body has since become derelict and horribly overgrown with.,....pizza..., and it's the last one you destroy to bring the whole thing down. he gives you a tired-looking thumbs up as you blast him off the screen.

none of this has anything to do with the protagonist, who doesn't know about any of it and is Exclusively there to beat pizza guy's ass for threatening his business. and if he has to bring down pizza guy's whole tacky-ass establishment to do that then SO BE IT.

you might notice in the larger background screenshot that the protag guy is Also being cloned in that facility. you do fight a clone of him as the 4th boss and encounter more of them in the level that background is for, but there seems to be very little concrete canon for what exactly pizza guy's intention with protag and his clones was.

aside: this isn't even touching on the other side to this, which is the weird amount of actual character depth that mr. funny cartoon protag man himself seems to have. i am not going to get into that on this post because it will make me really abnormal but oh my god dude.

[paragonraptors]

Hello, I absolutely adore that last piece of yours. The one from Andromeda. My question is - what are your favourite aspects of the game. I played the demo version (first ten hours) and I have mixed feelings about it. So I would like to know what kept you hooked on it if that's alright?

Thank you! You've just asked me the one question I have spent the last like 5 years thinking about. So, well...[cracks knuckles]. As much as I hate saying it, I feel like the first 10 hours are a poor representation of the game, depending on how quickly you progress through the main story. For better or worse, Andromeda's first act frontloads you with a lot of side quests, and I think a lot of the ways it presents its setting and ideas in that time can leave someone apprehensive about how it grapples with its themes later on. If you're willing after reading this, I'd grab it on sale for super cheap or borrow it from a friend/the library and give it at least until finishing the mission to rescue the Moshae on Voeld. (This is around the 15-20 hr mark.) Loyalty missions begin to trigger after that and you really start getting into the thick of it. Though I think they're worth doing as you progress (you are rewarded for it in the final mission), anything that's not in the main quest and companion tabs of the journal can pretty much be ignored without consequence and completed post-game.

Despite all the online shit, it was love at first sight for me. I played at launch and got close to finishing before the first major patch came out. A lot of what probably kept me in my first playthrough was that the idea I had for my Ryder fit really well into what the game gave me, so I was deeply invested in my PC. I think that can really influence one's enjoyment of an RPG.

Ryder is not Shepard, and Ryder's canonical backstory as a 22 year-old nepotism baby who, from what we can tell, had a fairly cushy life growing up on the Citadel until fairly recently is kind of essential for the story to work. I joked in a caption that ME:A is a YA dystopia, but I'm also completely serious about that. It still has a lot of the core cosmic horror themes of the original trilogy, but with a much more scrappy, unexperienced, underdog flavor that you get with a younger protagonist. I liked this in contrast to Shepard being highly and unquestionably competent and having already experienced significant trauma before the story starts via their origin or psych profile. It almost forces you to create an entirely different perspective on Mass Effect's universe as a whole.

Beyond that, it really hit on things I felt were missing from the original trilogy, and especially in comparison to ME1, it's an incredibly compelling introduction to a new trilogy. (I believe it is a disservice to compare ME:A to the original trilogy as a whole, and have come to these opinions by almost exclusively comparing it to 1.)

I really enjoyed the roleplay system. I think the casual/professional/logical/emotional wheel and the impulse actions were a good move away from the paragon/renegade thing. It allowed for choices to not get locked into the appearance of being "good" and "bad" or a kind of set personality type. I like that Ryder gets a psychological profile and relationship bios that are updated as you progress.

I'm a huge fan of all the characters. They carry this game. I think their flaws are interesting and add depth to what's appealing about them. I think the voice performances are just fantastic across the board. I really loved how the NPCs interact with each other and that they have distinct and active relationships outside of Ryder, which is something we didn't really get for the Normandy crew until 3. I love that the Tempest is a small scouting vessel with a crew of 11 all sharing *one toilet*. It's a MIRACLE they are not actively trying to kill each other! Especially when you consider the Normandy was so big it had a whole staff you just straight up didn't really get to know, and Shepard's squadmates were sometimes actually trying to kill each other-- And they at least had three toilets!!

The male characters were written with a vulnerable emotional depth we rarely get to see, especially in video games, and especially in the Mass Effect universe. Hearing them openly talk about their emotions without deflection, and sometimes even gawking at the idea of deflection, was really refreshing. Its easy to get caught up in Alec's whole thing, but the themes of masculinity and fatherhood in other characters' stories (Drack, Vetra, Gil, Jaal, and Liam particularly) offers some nice balance and reflection to that narrative to the point I believe they are intentional supplements/foils to what Alec's got going on.

This game is PACKED with ambient dialogue and text, and it makes the world feel so alive. The message boards, emails, and data pads you find throughout are so good. The ones on the Tempest and New Tuchanka in particular are my favorites, but even the text you can pull up from the forward stations have some delightful little bits. It's unfortunate that ambient dialogue/banter can get cut off by the slightest thing, and the only workaround is to just stop dead in your tracks the second you hear someone talking, but I love listening to the dialogue. It's crazy to me how much made the cut to be recorded and put in the final product despite the known time crunch issues of the game's production.

I've always favored Bioware's map design over of a lot of open-world games, and this one isn't any different. Though I wish they were more fleshed out, there's a solid attempt at introducing different mechanics for different areas of the game to switch things up. I lament the loss of controlling squadmate powers, but the combat is still fun and I enjoy the fluidity of the class system for mechanical and narrative purposes. I really enjoy Remnant sudoku.

For all the flack Andromeda caught about bad animation, it has some of my favorite bits of animation in an AAA video game. For every awkward animation there is a wonderfully charming and well-done one. I wish I could get into specifics without spoilers, but there's a list of ones that get me every time. I've also always considered these cosmetic flaws to be a feature I enjoy in games. So what Ryder runs kind of weird up and down stairs? Geralt Witcher3 can't walk stairs very well either, yet that somehow never came up when people would compare the two.

Your mileage could greatly vary when it comes to the main story. Upon several replays (through the whole series), really getting into the codices, and reading the novels, I think they were setting up a lot of really cool things that expanded on the ideas of the first three. Cosmic horror, creationism, the integration of organic life and artificial intelligence, regulation vs deregulation, autonomy and self-governance, resilience against entropy and destruction. However, I can see how it could come off as half-baked, thoughtless, even irresponsible. It's not perfect. It's clearly rushed in places and unfinished. I don't really have a counter-argument to this as it does also deal with sensitive topics- specifically colonialism and genocide- where people's tolerance can vary significantly. While Ryder can be fairly principled about the problems you encounter, and can often speak out or refuse to be complicit, not everything is handled delicately. Sometimes you will say "Man, I wish I could do this other thing instead of the options I'm given." or "Oof, that could have been written A Bit Better." It struggles to balance the shoot-em-up gameplay with the Moral Questions. I take it as the necessary, but flawed, result of not hand-holding and spelling everything out for an M-rated open-world RPG that can only offer so many variables, but not everyone feels that way, nor do they have to.

With all that said, this is just one of those games I keep coming back to and finding something new to love about it or a detail that illuminates something in an entirely new way. I think it's a shame that as far as we know, subsequent sequels have been cancelled. Much like ME1, the ending left me ready for more.

[catcze]

ooo more lore !! i don't usually use the wiki, i just look through items myself & i don't have those so i wasn't aware :0 wait watch me go on a wiki dive all night now adkhskdhfk. i do have a bit of a theory tho!

2.1 archon quest spoilers //

ok i'm probably gonna look like a clown when i'm proven wrong, but part of me kinda doubts signora's actually dead?? like, she seemed like a pretty major character, and it was so sudden. i know keeping her alive would undercut ei's power, but to be fair she hasn't had the gnosis for awhile, so the musou no hitotachi might not be as strong as it was when she slew orobashi, for example.

at the end, signora didn't use her vision(?) or delusion, opting to reach for ei's gnosis (that's what it looked like to me idk). which makes me think - if she wasn't using her pyro, why did she disintegrate to embers & ash instead of something more indicative of the lightning that killed her? i suppose it could just be a visual reference to how her body is made of liquid flame, but mayyyybe she did activate her pyro abilities at the last second to escape, and that's why her 'death' looked the way it did.

during the battle she seemed to be able to move pretty quickly in a pyro form of sorts, so what if she kinda.. dissolved into embers and disappeared of her own will? maybe she timed it right, or maybe she was hit by the musou no hitotachi - she is based on moths i think which have a sort of cycle of rebirth, and she did enter an ice chrysalis(?) mid-fight. so what if she's recuperating elsewhere in stasis like that, only to be 'reborn' later on in the game? many thoughts rn,,

idk, i'm sure i'm missing some points here, and i'm not rly convinced one way or another myself - i just think it would be cool if we saw more of her somehow hehe. as much as i love the whole 'mc befriends former bad guys they defeat' trope, it was refreshing to see a villain like her imo!

and yess, i've loved watching traveler grow more impatient & testy as the story progresses. altho the scene after signora's fight was.. a bit anticlimactic with my seelie dancing behind me lmao?? everything was dark & glitchy, traveler's silent, paimon's recounting the gruesome tale, and there's mr. bubblegum- "ubwbelbebrbeweb <3" doing flips in the background kdhfkhfsdkf - 🐺

GENSHIN SPOILERS

I mean, it's a possibility ! After all, genshin is supposed to go on for 7+ (10?) years, so any sorts of twists and turns are definitely probably down the line. There were also some leaks a few months ago that,,, kind of ? support this theory, if you squint.

But! Regarding what you said about her reaching for the gnosis, I'm afraid that's not quite possible, since it later gets revealed that it was with Yae, and then later traded to Scaramouche.

But yes!! I deffo do think it's plausible (maybe even possible, if more evidence surfaces over time and with more lore reveals) that she could have dodged a hit. It would be interesting to have that kind of twist to the story, but I do kind of agree that it,,, does put a damper on the Shogun's strong image ? Idk and I feel like some people might consider it a 'cheap' twist, espescially considering the heaviness that befell the traveller (maybe guilt ?? idk, that's how i personally interpret it) during that sort of slow, dark walk out of Tenshukaku. Not to mention how I think that seeing Signora die directly or indirectly because of the traveller's actions is something that I'm interested to see in the future, regarding on how this knowledge might change the travellers attitude towards others, if it'll push them to be more ruthless, or if it would make them a bit more hesitant to fight after they've seen a strong foe like Signora die because of losing the duel to them.

And in a way,,, i don't know, and this is kind of opinionated, but I feel like killing Signora then reviving her would,,, be somewhat unsatisfying ? Because,,, it kinda feels like Genshin is going down a slightly different path now. It's grown a bit heavier and darker with the occurrence of its first on-screen death (and major off-screen death w/ Teppei) and i feel like turning around in the future and saying 'oh! actually this character isn't dead' feels too much like a 'take-back' or like they're backing out of that darker theme, which feels a bit unsatisfactory given that he archon quest has begun to push that sort of narrative, and it's an interesting route to go, considering we've seen the heaviness that meeting their sibling that has (presumably) pushed the sibling into being more direct in wanting to complete their mission (in how, at first, they just wanted to see the shogun, and not get wrapped up in the whole resistance thing) and how angry they got when Teppei died. Personally, 'taking back' something as big as the first character who the traveller is indirectly/directly responsible for killing feels,,, very much like they're just pandering to younger audiences, and i feel like it would be a cheap twist or a disservice to the heaviness that befell the traveller after the fight itself.

but idk thats just my opinion lmao,, wanting her to revive is valid too!! And i deffo agree that is was sooo refreshing to see a villain that was,,, wel, a villain. One without any highlighted redeeming qualities. One that's just bad. It was nice hahha

ALSO PLS THE SEELIE ASKJDN I love the name you've given him HAHAHA <33 also !! hope u enjoyed the lore dive, if you've done it. I mostly stick to the wiki instead of the game, since like you can open links in the paragraph instead of having to rifle through all the stuff in the game HAHHA

[calangkoh]

and im done. up next conqueror of shamballa!

okay honest opinions about this ending. i like that its imperfect. but i still wish it were happier. i get the feeling if they didnt have cos they would have ended this differently, because this ending seems to specifically set up the movie. but the movie is another work, even if its the real ending, and im here to talk about the series. so on its own, disregarding the movie, i think this ending is. ok. i dont think its BAD, but a deeply unsatisfying one that works for its themes and tone. its imperfect and bittersweet. i like that. id keep that. it implies theyll find a way back to each other one day, even if we have no idea how. but id still change it if i could because even if an unsatisfying ending is poetic (because Tragedies exist, where unhappy endings are poignant and meaningful) in relation to the series’ core themes, its still unsatisfying. the ending of cos is satisfying enough, because the brothers are together, but still rather sad.

but heres the thing. mangahood exists. metatextually, this ending is great (and that way i wouldnt say is a definitive way to judge a series, just a way to enhance what already exists within the worlds own universe). because theres a certain level of poetic justice and karma to have an AU that has a tragic ending with characters who suffered so much and didn’t get what they deserved in the end, and then the other work that was released after give you the same characters and give them everything the deserved. 

contrary to how much i try to judge the two series based on their own merits and not in comparison to one another, both fma 03 and fmab feel like two incomplete works that need each other to exist. an example i can think of to explain what i mean is how the two legend of zelda games, phantom hourglass and spirit tracks, are two similar games that seem to both be a half of a whole game, as youtuber King K describes. he says he cant judge them individually because it does them a disservice, as they both feel like incomplete works without the other. this applies even more appropriately to the fma series, because they are both adaptations of the same story and same world and characters. they both do something differently and they do that thing very well on their own. but to fully appreciate either, you need to watch both. because one will deliver something the other didnt. im sure there are people who will disagree with me, because a lot of people have said 03 isnt worth watching and fmab is definitive and all you need. i strongly disagree, of course. but my point is that the ending of 03 is infinitely better when you consider that the writers (which included arakawa’s own input) intended a totally different ending than the one arakawa had told them of in her manga, to specifically make their own story that felt different from fmab when they ultimately go on to make it. they did it on purpose with the manga and brotherhood’s ending in mind. so that people will be hungry for more and be satisfied and surprised by mangahood’s ending. so that brotherhood feels like a do over, a second life where everything works out better, where the universe is kinder and more ordered, for the characters we fell in love with in 03. 

anyway, the ending of 03 is not my ideal. but it works in its story, and i appreciate a special kind of beauty in it. and the ending of 03 could definitely be more structured. i wont deny the common criticisms that 03′s ending feels jumbled. even if it makes sense and has a powerful message after you take the time unjumbling it, it doesnt mean its not jumbled. and i really only feel its in the last couple episodes. i think everything the series set out to do was done great, and they just were so ambitious that the ending was TOO ambitious for them to tell cohesively. and thats okay, ultimately. the series is still good. its still amazing! if most people say “that series was so good, i just didnt like the ending (and likely prefer fmab as a result)” which from what ive seen and heard, is the most common opinion. and if the ending really is the only major complaint, i dont think that makes the whole work bad. tons of works have bad endings, and sometimes they break the series (like game of thrones, from what ive heard). but a “bad ending” doesnt define the whole series imo unless it truly retroactively destroys all it built up and stood for (like how i met your mother, in some sense to me). but 03 doest do that. its ending still adheres to its core themes and goals from the start. therefore, just because the ending isnt a crowd pleaser, even just because its a tad confusing, doesnt mean its bad.

that all being said. fma 03 is fantastic. i love this show. i think its one of the best and deserves to be praised as much as brotherhood. i give this show a 9.5/10 (-.5 points for the jumbled ending and some strange fillers cough episode 4 cough and other weird episodes) and my ratings dont really have any real rhyme or reason, so that doesnt REALLY mean anything other than “this show is good”

so yeah. this has been fun. thank you all who interacted with my liveblog! ill liveblog cos but idk if ill have a lot to say about it. and then ill liveblog brotherhood (in small doses, since i dont wanna take away from this being an 03 appreciation blog)!

[4dorks-1windmage-1shadow]

The Links as D&D Characters, Part 4: Violet (Vio) Link

Inspired by a question I saw on @hauntinghyrule ‘s blog. My character analysis and thoughts on what character class the boys would be if they were D&D characters, and why.

Green / Red / Blue / Shadow / Vaati / FS Zelda

As a preface, there won’t be any doubles on classes except in the case of dual-classing, and in those cases the first class I talk about my justifications for will be the primary class (i.e. the class they would have chosen at level one). My choices will be based on the character theming and personalities, even though at a base level it would be easy to say “they’re all paladins, duh” because of the implied “holy knight chosen by the gods to eradicate evil” concept. Vio is a high Intelligence, high Dexterity, high Charisma character- or at least he is based on his depiction in the manga. You may be thinking: Athena, what do you mean Vio has high charisma? Isn’t he more known for his intelligence and strategic abilities? You’re right, and also, you misunderstand. He’s not using that high charisma for Persuasion or Performance or even Intimidation. Remember how Vio spends an entire story arc fooling Shadow into thinking they were friends and Vio was evil, and how he also fooled Green, Red, and Blue (up until giving Green the hint that he was a double agent)? That’s all going into Deception baby! There’s only two classes that I can think of where Intelligence, Dexterity, and Charisma (1 out of the two for CHA actually) are major players: Wizards and Rogues. My actual pick is Rogue, but we’ll go through Wizard just to see why I didn’t go with Wizard.  Vio’s demeanor lends itself well to the vision of a wizard- wizards are spellcasters that gain magic through intense study, and Vio is seen carrying a book around during the manga. This book somehow magically has the answers to whatever he needs (or it was just specifically written about Force Gems and I’m being dramatic), and Wizards have spellbooks that have their spells in it. Vio could be a really great wizard, but there’s three issues I personally found with that.  1. Wizards have low HP. Their hit dice is a d6 (a trait they share with Sorcerers), and Vio could go head to head with Green in melee combat. Of course, low health doesn’t usually matter if you don’t get hit, but the whole point of a wizard is to hide behind the beefier tanks and blast the big bad monster with meteor strikes and giant explosions and like a whole lot of psychic damage and pray to whatever gods might take pity on a poor arcane magic user that the big bad doesn’t just like. . .step on them. Vio may not be as much of a front line fighter as say, Green and Blue are, but he’s not squishy. 2. Wizard subclasses give tons of variety in terms of how you can play them, but I don’t see any of the wizard Arcane Traditions being worth the low health, complete lack of armor and complete lack of ranged weapons (meaning Vio wouldn’t have access to his signature bow). School of Abjuration isn’t a good fit, because Vio’s idea of protecting is to actually throw himself head first into danger (like when he dived in front of Stone Arrghus to save Red, or like the entire double-agent arc). School of Conjuration doesn’t have anything that really relates to Vio symbolically or in regards to his story arc. School of Divination could be a good fit for him, since he’s all about knowledge and anticipating what the enemy is going to do next, but then. . .Blue’s weird spidey-sense in the Erune & Rosie story could make him a contender for that if his intelligence stat were high enough. School of Enchantment is a no, because even though Vio has high enough charisma to deceive pretty much everybody in the double-agent arc, he’s not. . .ever really shown doing anything else charismatic, and it just doesn’t seem fitting for the type of character he is. School of Evocation is the magic of big explosions and elemental magic, which is great, but showing off is rarely Vio’s style. School of Illusion is really the only one that might fit, and only because of Vio’s deceptive and manipulative nature, but again he doesn’t get to have archery and if he doesn’t get to have archery what’s the fucking point. School of Necromancy is stereotyped as the “evil” option (which personally I don’t agree with but I didn’t write the rules) or at the very least taboo magic, which I don’t see Vio being in pursuit of knowledge enough to dip into that well. Finally, School of Transmutation symbolically works for his character arc: he transforms by learning that the world isn’t quite as black and white as he thought it was, and Shadow was not as evil as he seemed; however, that’s a bit of a stretch.

3. All of this was a very long-winded way of saying that I didn’t make him a wizard even though it would be a decent fit because I’m saving wizard for a different character and thank you for reading that long ass paragraph. So why does rogue fit better? Rogues are OP as fuck, that’s why. They get access to ranged weapons, and at first level you get to choose four skills. Four whole skills out of Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Insight, Intimidation, Investigation, Perception, Performance, Persuasion, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth. Vio then gets to take up to a max of 4 of those skills (or any of the skills he has proficiency with) and double how good he is at those things. Vio has the most potential to be a fairly stealthy, strike from the shadows type of fighter. Or rather, according to the rules of Sneak Attack (which does 10d6, or an average of 35 extra damage on a hit), strike from within 5 feet of Blue, Green or Red who are also fighting the same enemy. Rogue Vio gets to learn secret codes and how to pick locks, he can Dodge, Dash, or Hide without taking up his attacking action. He can reduce the amount of damage he takes as a reaction, he gets proficiency in Wisdom saving throws (thank god because he actually needs it), ignore enemy advantage and turn missed attacks into hits. He’s just so tactical! So strategic! And rogue’s Blindsense also means that he has fucking echolocation up to 10 feet. So we’re really hitting all of the marks on what makes Vio a better Rogue than he is a Wizard, and we still haven’t talked about Roguish Archetypes. In Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, there is a Roguish Archetype called Mastermind. It’s description reads “A master tactician, manipulates others”. That’s Vio. He’s in the book. Admittedly, Vio isn’t just manipulative, smart, a tactician, deceptive, etc.- there are times in the manga where he’s sensitive, foolhardy, bull-headed and just not the brightest. Like saying that all Blue is is an angry hot-head, saying Vio is just a non-emotional strategist is a disservice to his character. Vio has lots of book smarts, but he is not wise. Key example of this: the entire Shadow Link and “Evil” Vio arc. We see his perspective actually get challenged by the way Shadow acts and treats him. Prior to that story line he probably saw Shadow as a one-dimensional villain, but after. . .well, he learned not to judge a book by its cover. Mastermind Rogue is actually well-suited to this lesson- it focuses on learning the secrets underneath the exterior of a person. Granted that does come back around to manipulating and strategizing again, but the point is that he would learn to be more mindful of what a person could actually be like instead of what they portray on the surface. It gives him proficiency with the disguise kit, forgery kit, and a gaming set, as well as two extra language. Further adding to my personal headcanon: Vio is talented as shit. Jack of all trades, master of none. The Help action gets added to the Dodge, Dash and Hide list as tactics he can use without having to take up his attacking action, and the range of that Help action extends up to 30 feet. Insightful Manipulation grants him the ability to learn the INT, WIS, and CHA stats of a target that he interacts with or observes for a set amount of time, and as a reaction he can have an attack target someone else instead of him. At the highest level of Mastermind, his mind can literally not be read by telepathy or any other means, and in a Zone of Truth area of effect he can lie his ass off even if he failed the saving throw and no matter what he says he’s telling the truth according to the spell. He can bullshit a lie detector test and get away with it. Mastermind Rogue Vio. He’s like that one vine that goes “you better watch out, you better watch out, you better watch out, you better watch out-”. 

[thes-hitoverlord]

Best animated series of 2019

This list is purely subjective. Only includes series that started airing in 2019, with the exception of seasonal anime. 

Cartoon Network 

Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart

Imagine if Shadow the Hedgehog had to babysit the Carebears, and protect them from 80s Cobra Commander/Shredder/Megatron/Mum-Ra/Skeletor. Now imagine it actually being good.

Infinity Train

This is what you would probably get if you made a kid-friendly adaptation of the No End House creepypasta. A solid miniseries that surprisingly seems to share some themes with the old Silent Hill video game series. Despite being intended as a self-contained miniseries, it got a second season. Judging by the trailers, the second season seems to be focusing on new characters.

Victor and Valentino

You can oversimplify a bit by calling this show “Mexican Gravity Falls” alto the series itself has more similarities to Regular Show. Originally I wondered whether or not to include this, as the series is largely hit or miss with its quality. However the episodes that are actually good make it worth. 

Adult Swim 

Primal

A new series by Genndy Tartakovsky, which made me realize just how I miss old-school macho protagonists. Outside of amazing and brutal action scenes, the series has amazing writing, despite having no dialogue. 

Tigtone

Best described as a parody of RPG videogames and tabletop RPGs. The main protagonist can be described as the sort of character a min-maxer/munchkin/power-gamers would create. 

Warner bros. 

DC Super Hero Girls

New series by Lauren Faust, based on a doll line, based of DC comics characters. Major improvement over the old web series. 

Disney 

Amphibia

How come America makes better Isekai anime than Japan? 

Netflix 

Carmen Sandiego plays as a sort of origin story of the master thief. 

Nickelodeon 

It’s Pony

Series literally just started, as Nickelodeon uploaded the first episode onto its Youtube. Only judging based of of the first episode, but it does make me want to see more. 

The Casagrandes

If you liked The Loud House, you’ll probably like this as well. Let us be fair, this is mostly an excuse for Nickelodeon to make more Loud House episodes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 

Anime 

series based on Shogakukan manga Dororo adapts an old classic by Osamu Tezuka, while improving on an already good source material. Mob Psycho 100 (season 2) continues to deliver on the high standards set by the first seasons

series based on Kadokawa properties I usually don’t like Isekai anime, but The Rising of the Shield Hero puts a twist on the whole thing by instead of having everyone love the protagonist, the whole world shits on him for something that was not even his fault. Series caused allot of backlash from left-wing extremist, which however only helped to promote the series. 

series based on Shogakukan manga From the pages of Shonen Jump we are getting The Promised Neverland, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Dr. Stone, and My Hero Academia (season 4). One-Punch Man (season 2) got criticized for using cheaper animation compared to the first season, but still delivers in the writing department. No Guns Life follows a hard-boiled detective who is also a giant talking gun, and it is treated 100% seriously, and it is awesome. A really solid cyberpunk conspiracy thriller overall. 

series based on Kodansha manga Fire Force is a series by Atsushi Okubo,  the creator of Soul Eater follows a group of fire fighters in a world where an outbreak is turning people into fire monsters. A fairly standard battle shonen series, but very well executed. Vinland Saga is a gritty historical drama with excelent character writing. While we age here I will also address season 3 of The Seven Deadly Sins, where while I loved the first two seasons, I em just not feeling the third. 

series based on Akita Shoten manga If I were to oversimplify, I’d call Beastars a gritty remake of Zootopia, but that would be a disservice. It is largely a psychological and social drama that tackles social issues while also avoiding being preachy or in your face. A little tidbit of information I would also add is that the series creator Paru Itagaki,  is the daughter of Keisuke Itagaki, the creator of Baki the Grappler. 

other

Mr. Magoo

A new adaptation of the old character that turned out surprisingly well. Gets away with jokes I would not expect them to pull in the present day political climate. 

[synthient]

The Key to Understanding Deltarune: The Halloween Hack

So we’re currently in the middle of a 4000 year content hiatus

Which is unfortunate, because ever since the big iconic Halloween-day surprise demo drop, my brain has been rattling a baseball bat against the inside of my skull and chanting “CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT”

Undertale was like candy for the thematic analysis side of my brain. I still wake up in a cold sweat some nights going “fun value......he put a quantitative value on fun.....numbers going up.....”

I am desperate to know what kind of themes Deltarune is going to tackle. Can you effectively predict that from one (1) 3 hour demo? No. Does my brain care? No.

Which is what lead me to the wonderful world of intertextuality, or examining how a media text is shaped by other media texts

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this with me doing a playthrough of EarthBound, the video game that Toby has cited as his biggest inspiration for Undertale

That was fun & interesting (the “throwing away an emotionally engaging experience to grimly make Numbers Go Up” thing feels a lot closer to home after trying and failing to get the sword of kings), but it didn’t provide much insight into Deltarune, specifically. It wasn’t enough. I needed more. I was willing to dig into literally any intertext (except Homestuck, which no force on this earth can compel me to read :) )

anyway thats how I ended up playing Toby Fox’s high school fangame

And somehow (sorry Toby) I walked out of there with an unironic theory (a game theory....if you will....): Deltarune is Toby’s adult reexamination of the Halloween Hack.

What is the Halloween Hack?

You know that thing where, like, people take the engine of a Pokemon game and edit it so there’s a new region and a bunch of new fakemon, and also There’s Swears Now

In 2008, Toby Fox entered a contest on an EarthBound fansite for the best Halloween-themed EarthBound hack

In one sense, reducing the Halloween Hack to a “bad romhack with swears” is a little bit of a disservice. There are some glimmers in there of a really affecting, thought-provoking game, and you can see some of the early blueprints of what would later become Undertale (“do video game ‘monsters’ really deserve to die” is a major theme, and the character of Dr. Andonuts was effectively split up into Alpyhs, Asgore, and Sans)

But it’s also. very much a fangame made by a 16-year-old.

You can read a basic summary of the Hack here. High school-age Toby wrote two pretty extensive analyses of his thought process behind the game. I’ll be referring back to them a lot, and I’d highly suggest giving them a read--Toby’s been so famously resistant to making any Word of God statements about Undertale that it’s kind of fascinating to see him being so candid

an extremely long and rambling examination of How This All Relates To Deltarune

The Halloween Hack opens in the town of Halloween Twoson. Twoson is one of the cites in EarthBound, and here it’s been painted orange. and there’s pumpkins now

See, high school Toby had...a bit of a chip on his shoulder. In the Making Of notes, he explains that he was frustrated that “most people generally thought I was just ‘another funny guy’”. So he designed the opening of the game to seem unoriginally close to the original EarthBound--like “a regular, funny, lazy hack”--to lull players into a false sense of security before the horror elements set in.

Two interesting things there:

“Lazily, unoriginally close to the source game” sounds an awful lot like the Dark World segment of Deltarune

Halloween Twoson looks very visually similar to Hometown

Toby’s description of Twoson also sounds pretty Hometown-esque:

The main impressions of Twoson that I wanted to give the player were: It's funny. It's a nice fall day outside. The person hacking this game is ridiculously lazy. It's a nice place to live. If you look at it a little closely, it's kind of claustrophobic.  

And when does the horror kick in? When the player descends into the underground tunnels beneath the city.

The “horror” in the Halloween Hack is, however, Pretty Not Good.

There’s a whole lot of the flavor text narrator (put a pin in that one) insisting “this is so scary. you’re so scared. your hands shake and your head throbs because you’re so scared.” There’s also a thing where the battle text keeps going “the shambling zombie BITES your HEAD OFF!!! (you lose 15 hp).”

I think the True Lab sequence in Undertale is a decent demonstration that Toby’s come a long way since then (and that Honey We’ve Got A Storm Coming :’) ). But you know what the Hack’s style of horror reminds me of?

My first thought when I beat the demo and saw this stinger was “this looks like an intentionally shitty creepypasta.” Now I wonder if it’s lowkey adult Toby poking a little fun at teenage Toby

The Halloween Hack is a game about railroading. It’s Spec Ops The Line before there was Spec Ops The Line.

According to Toby:

The main theme of this game is the lack of choice. There is really no choice in this game. From the moment you start to the moment you finish, you're destined to kill Dr. Andonuts. There are two endings, but they both eventually end up the same way. It's all a big joke on the player.

You know why there isn't a choice there? Because you already chose to make Varik go into the door. You already chose to go forward. The only real choice, as Varik realizes at the end of the game, is to stop or keep going. By "stop" he means "turn off the game," and that's all you can do. Anything you play is your own fault for playing, and that's the only real choice you can make.

Interesting? Yeah. A little obnoxious? Also yeah.

That’s one of the criticisms people had of Spec Ops. "The atrocities we commit when we feel like we don’t have a choice” is an intriguing theme, but “~the only way to win is not to play~ [the game I worked hard on for the express purpose of people playing it]” isn’t a very satisfying conclusion.

Undertale, in direct contrast to the Hack, is all about choice. It earns the right to guilt you for the No Mercy Run by giving you every opportunity not to go through with it.

But even Undertale plays a little with the concept of railroading--you can’t stay with Toriel; you can’t spare Asgore in any of the neutral runs; you can’t save Asriel.

Now Deltarune seems to be returning full-on to the Hack’s “your choices don’t matter” premise. But it’s going to need to find something more insightful and satisfying to say about it.

Which makes me really curious about this:

If the Hack has a secondary theme besides railroading/lack of choice, it’s The Soul-Crushing Impact Of Internalized Homophobia.

The tragic antagonist, Dr. Andonuts, destroys his own life trying to repress his gay desire. He retreats into a dream world made of his neuroses and trauma, and he’s inevitably Otherized and murdered by the player. He’s something of a dark version of Alphys, who “disappears” into her lab without ever meeting and getting support from Frisk, Papyrus, and Undyne.

Undertale takes an opposite approach to its lgbt themes--the Underground is a utopia where homophobia and transphobia don’t exist. Everyone respects Frisk’s and Chara’s pronouns. Alphys finds solace and healing in her relationship with Undyne.

It’s a heartwarming growth from the despair in the Halloween Hack. And it’s a vision that’s been deeply meaningful to a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no value in exploring issues of homophobia. 16-year-old Toby tried to do that, but...wasn’t exactly at a point where he was equipped to handle it with a ton of sensitivity and nuance.

(There’s. There’s a boss battle where you fight the physical manifestation of Andonuts’ gay repression. It’s a crotch. You fight a crotch.)

Some of the hints in the Deltarune demo, however--the Toriel Has Become Catholic thing; the fact that Alphys and Undyne haven’t met and Mettaton hasn’t been able to transition; the potential trans implications of choosing a name only to have it discarded for an assigned one (“you can’t choose who you are in this world”)--make me suspect that’s one of the themes that Toby will try to revisit from an adult perspective.

The Hack is interested in the idea of the flavor text narrator as a distinct, intelligent entity, whose thoughts and goals don’t always align with those of the player character or the player. 

The Hack’s narrator makes a habit of dictating “your” emotions to you (you’re scared; you can sense ‘the monster’ and you want to kill it; etc). The narration starts to seem more and more unreliable, until, as Toby put it, “The narrator starts talking to you personally...rambling about incoherent things.”

At the game’s turning point, you’re given a yes/no choice to kill Dr. Andonuts. Choose yes, and the narrator (mockingly?) calls you a good person, describes the murder you commit, and then narrates what appears to be your (or their? or Varik’s?) psychological breakdown. Choose no, and the narrator tells you that’s not a real choice and redirects you back to the yes/no box. If you press the b-button to try and opt out of the choice (the game’s unofficial subtitle is “Press the B-Button Stupid,” and doing so allows you to follow Andonuts into his dream world), the narrator starts to panic, although the game ultimately ends the same way.

Not to NarraChara Real, but NarraChara Real 

The Hack is also interested in the idea of the player character as a possibly-unwilling puppet controlled by the player (who in turn is controlled by the railroading/their need to beat the game).

According to Toby:  

 As you approach someone you've never met that you're labeling as a monster, your body pushes you forward to kill him. What's funny is that it's not even uncontrolled, it's really just the force of the player's controller pushing that little bounty hunter into murdering Andonuts. You might not realize it, but Varik is almost dead, and yet he can't stop moving because you keep pushing those buttons. 

The Halloween Hack is, fundamentally, a nostalgic meditation on an existing game.

It’s a little obvious to say, but the Hack isn’t a standalone game. It’s a hack of EarthBound.

Toby writes:

EarthBound dominated my childhood, shaped my preteen years, and played a large role in molding me into the offbeat pseudohippie I am today. It gave me a sense of humor. It helped me learn how to read. Its lessons served as a basis for my sense of justice and courage.

But at age 16, Toby’s feeling about the game that had shaped him were a little mixed. He describes “the staleness of a fifteen-year-old video game” as one of his motivations for making the Hack.

In Deltarune, he (kind of hilariously) has Alphys parrot his teen-self’s “staleness” line:

(I could write a whole meta just on the Mew Mew Kissy Cutie vs Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 thing)

Still, Toby’s nostalgia for EarthBound is essential to how the Hack operates. Earlier, I said there were glimmers of an thoughtful, affecting game buried in the “bad romhack with swears.” The most genuinely moving moment in the Hack, in my opinion, is the Onett sequence. 

You wander though a faded, dream world version of Onett--the hometown from EarthBound--while a slowed down arrangement of the Onett music plays. Snatches of forgotten conversations appear on road signs. Various monsters from EarthBound follow slowly behind you, but don’t attack. The only battles are against creatures called “Remember Me?”

The EarthBound characters appear to recognize “Varik” as Ness, EarthBound’s protagonist--or are they recognizing you, the player, as the same person who played EarthBound once upon a time?

The one problem, of course, is that not everyone has played EarthBound. It’s a relatively niche game. The sense of remembrance and regret and loss in the Onett sequence is universal, but being shaped as a person by the specific video game EarthBound isn’t a universal experience.

But in the years since the Hack, Toby has created something with a wider reach than EarthBound. Something that can evoke that sense of memory and nostalgia in players. A familiar game that he can take apart, rearrange, and examine in an entirely different light.

He made Undertale.

And now he’s rearranging the pieces into Deltarune.

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: January 2020

Hey here’s how I spent the start of this fine new year!

……….FILM……….

Parasite (2019) I was so focused on the plot that I don’t think I fully appreciated the beauty in this film. Watching this video helped a lot. One thing I admit (light spoilers to follow...skip past if you don’t want anything spoiled) is that I assumed there would be some sort of genre/fantastical element to the whole film. Because I’ve only seen The Host and Snowpiercer (loved both), I think I expected there to be a genre component to the whole thing. When they go down into the basement I really thought it was heading in that direction, and I definitely felt a little let down because of it. BUT after seeing the whole film, I feel like the themes and narrative were stronger because of how real it all felt. (END OF SPOILERS) I think it’s a film I’d like to rewatch to better appreciate the layers, but ho boy is it an emotional gutpunch.

Jojo Rabbit (2019) Just the best. The structure and (some) of the characters felt familiar, but it’s that comfort that makes the changes or introduction of an imaginary Hitler all the more interesting. Beautifully directed and the shifts in tone are so seamless that I really have a hard time pointing out where they happen.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) A little late to this but it was as good as I’d heard. It had the pacing, spirit, and lightness of late 90s/early 2000 adventure movies and I hope more films like this are getting the go ahead. Now to wait 3 years before seeing the sequel.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019) A fun road trip movie that dips into scathing commentary on hollywood and talk shows? Absolutely. It worked well in building off of the webseries and the bloopers during the end credits really made it for me. Also I should’ve been playing Comedy Bang Bang Bingo while watching the movie. Anyway it does a great job of balancing the mean with genuine character moments and glimpses of sincerity.

……….TELEVISION……….

The Bachelor (Episode 24.01 to 24.03) It started out so promising (with the Hannah Brown return) that I was really primed for a format-shaking season. Nothing can quite live up to that beginning and it’s doing the show a disservice. Maybe if they just focused on nice reasonable dates and women getting along it would feel more substantial than the contrived fighting and lies we’re getting. I still believe that the most engaging season will actually be the one with the least drama. Perhaps I’m in the majority for thinking this.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Episode 3.01 to 3.03) Reeeeeeally digging this season. Maybe it’s that there isn’t much relationship drama, or because the relationships play a part in the larger plot (as opposed to Riverdale...but that’s another can of worms). The Cthulhu and carnival stuff are offering a nice mix and we’re really getting lots of monster-of-the-week stuff so far. Hopefully there’s more to come!

Swamp Thing (Episode 1.03 to 1.07) It started out strong and moved at a nice pace, but it lost me. Some episodes had a monster-of-the-week, and those were fun but there was a lot more focus on the locals around the town instead of Swamp Thing. I appreciate a Swamp Thing-centric show would cost a looooooot more, but I also think that’s what most of the fans would want, right? Maybe if it was a 4-ep series it could really go all out and make a splash.

……….READING……….

Dracula vs. Hitler by Patrick Sheane Duncan (Complete) The title and back cover allude to a different, pulpier story, and it takes a while to adjust to the less bombastic narrative. The alternate history you DO get is great, and I think it’s because I didn’t mind a story with a hint of vampire set during the second world war. I’d still love to read a pulpy vamps vs. nazis novel, so if you have one then let me know. This wasn’t perfect, but I enjoyed it.

Head Lopper Volume 3: Head Lopper & the Knights of Venora by Andrew Maclean and Jordie Bellaire (Complete) There’s been a shift and a progression across the first three volumes of Head Lopper. It’s gotten more bold with its storytelling, a little more loose with its artwork (sometimes a hit and miss...I frequently go back because I feel like I’ve missed something in a previous panel) and the sheer scale of the world is expanding so quickly. It’s quickly becoming my favourite modern comic that captures the spirit of what I imagine pulp stories to be. Worth checking out vol. 1 if you haven’t already.

The Magicians: Alice’s Story by Lev Grossman, Lilah Sturges, and Pius Bak (Complete) If you haven’t read any of the Magician’s trilogy by Grossman, this is a great point of entry to see if you’d like the tone, characters, and general premise. If you HAVE read the first novel, this doesn’t branch too far the main narrative. I would’ve liked to spend a little more time with Alice on her own outside of what we see from the novel (and Quentin’s point of view) because what we do get is fantastic. I’m not sure it adds a lot of new elements to the novels but take that for what it is.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Legendary Edition  by Akira Himekawa (Complete) As far as a comic adaptation of a game, it really retains a lot of the core components. There are fun asides and elements get expanded further and it reads really well. Adaptations across media can be tricky but I think this is worth checking out if you liked the game. With that said, there’s a bonus story at the end that is so unrelated to the game and core world that it felt like a miss. It just felt like the author had a completely different story to tell and tried to shoehorn it into this property and it didn’t work. So if you pick it up, know that the best ending is the one you got in the game.

……….AUDIO……….

Yo, Is This Racist (Podcast) I’ve only recently started listening to this, but I really dig the format and the hosts are fun. Part reflection on current events, part interview, part commentary on society...it’s just all very good and funny and also good again.

……….GAMING……….

Baby Is You (Arvi Teikari) Never have I felt more frustrated, rewarded, and impressed by a game. I originally thought it was a sort of “there are endless ways to solve each stage!” game but it turns out the later levels have very specific solutions and that changed my perspective. It’s challenging but fun and uses lots of logic and creative thinking and I just don’t know how to describe how great this game is. Playing it on Switch is nice for the ease of playing a level or two before quitting, but I’m sure it’s fun elsewhere as well.

Neverland: A Role-Playing Game (Andrews McMeel Publishing) So I wrote a setting based on J. M. Barrie’s works and it’s getting published! The weekly group is taking a break from the megadungeon to try this out and it’s been a lot of fun! I will post more in depth recaps of the party’s adventures but so far, they’ve found a small village and nearly died to crocodiles.

A Red & Pleasant Land (Lamentations of the Flame Princess) It’s been aaaaaaaages since this group has had a chance to get together but it’s always so fantastic when we can make it work. The game is really getting to the point where the party has done enough that their actions are having consequences and the group...is adjusting to this. Right now they need to investigate a murder that they themselves are responsible for and I’m VERY keen to see how they approach it.

And that’s it! As always, let me know if you have any recommendations for what to read or watch or hear or play and happy Friday.

[kylermalloy]

My Official Unofficial Ranking of Supernatural Seasons That Nobody Asked For

This was...surprisingly easy. For someone who has a hard time picking favorites, I’m apparently quite eager to throw some seasons of one of my favorite shows under the bus.

My reasonings for this ranking are...all over the place. Since I’m considering seasons as a whole, I look mostly at the overall narrative structure, the prevalent themes, and the major character arcs. I won’t take individual/one-off episodes into much consideration...except for when I do. I won’t like some seasons/story arcs for any rationale between “this was sloppily executed,” “the message is misunderstood by viewers,” or even just that gif of Chris Evans “I don’t wike it.” I’m trying to look at seasons and storylines objectively, but I guarantee my Sam!girl bias will peek through at some point. Also, I reserve the right to change my mind at any point after I post this!

From bottom to top:

14 - Season 14

Ah, the twilight years of SPN. Now that we know this is the penultimate season, I’m a bit more lenient toward its shortcomings. Long running shows usually do stutter to a halt, story-wise. But still. I’m not taking it out of the bottom spot.

What was this season even about? Michael overtaking Dean? Nah, that barely lasted three whole episodes. Jack becoming evil? Not until the last six episodes. Team Free Will becoming a cohesive family unit? Lol. For a season that tried to set up Jack’s evil arc as a kid betraying his family, I hardly saw this “family” except in fanworks. The most heartfelt moments remained between Sam and Dean (not that I’m complaining about that—I loved those moments!) Was there an overarching theme besides “nobody is okay, especially Sam”? Season 14 is clumsy, unfocused, and does a poor job of telling the story it tried to tell. Even Mary’s second death reeked of “well, we didn’t know what to do with her and we needed a tragedy.” Oh yeah, and John was back for a hot minute.

13 - Season 9

Here’s one of these weird seasons. I like it, but I don’t. It’s well done, but it’s terrible. Also, I’m taking fan response into consideration on this one, since it colored my perception of it so negatively.

Season 9 could have been great. In a way, it was great. It was Dean’s dark arc—the part of Dean’s dark arc that I like. I’m not here to debate, just lay out the story. Dean stepped over a line. He tricked Sam into possession, lied to him for months, then refused to apologize afterward. He took the Mark of Cain as a penance, but it blew up in his face and turned him into something worse than he was before.

This is where fan response comes in. Fandom (from what I can tell; I wasn’t here back then) vilified Sam for setting boundaries with Dean, overwhelmingly siding with poor Dean who just didn’t want to be alone. The show, on paper, wasn’t trying to make the audience think this, but the POVs were skewed in such a way that we hardly got a chance to see Sam’s perspective and Sam’s trauma—so casual viewers didn’t really have a choice.

On a completely unrelated note (see, this is why this season is ranked so low) we have the angel storyline. What could’ve been a really cool and impactful story of celestial beings walking the earth, as well as Castiel exploring his new humanity in a way (that wasn’t just about sex) ended up a trite, dull affair about underdeveloped politics and characters I don’t care about. Did Metatron (the supposed big bad) even care about the Winchesters? I can’t remember. Only the actor’s indulgently entertaining performance saves that character. Even Castiel’s human arc was so short and ignored I sometimes forget it happened. This was a season that was so all over the place—good bones, bad execution.

12 - Season 12

This season is just...forgettable. Yet another season that was so all over the place—but unlike season 9, the story arcs did not culminate in a cool twist that pushed the SPN story to new heights. We had the BMOL, Mary’s return, and the Lucifer/Kelly/Dagon/nephilim story, and...honestly I can barely remember anything about them. The twisting story threads got interlocked at some points, like Mary working with the BMOL, and Sam and Dean working with them to take down Lucifer, but the threads were all wrapped up independently. To me, this suggests a lack of true investment in the stories and season arcs. Ultimately, Mary’s return was utterly wasted, the BMOL might as well have never existed, and the Lucifer storyline is a bloody, bloated carcass being dragged along behind the show by a fraying rope (called Buckleming) complete with a bad smell.

The reason I rank this season above season 9 is that I don’t shudder when I hear people talking about season 12. I don’t generally get angry when I think about it (except the way they did Crowley dirty) and it did give us Jack, the greatest fanon projection the show has ever given us. (I’ll elaborate on that in a minute)

11 - Season 10

This is the season in which I don’t like Dean’s dark arc. By that I mean...it wasn’t much of a dark arc. Instead of exploring Dean’s inner darkness and the choices that led him to take the MoC, we get a meandering season of (pretty enjoyable) one-offs. We are repeatedly told Dean can’t fight off what he truly is—except we’re also being told that Dean can’t truly control what the MoC is doing to him, meaning the MoC isn’t what he truly is. It’s a mixed message, and it ends up being too many episodes in a row of Dean staring moodily at his arm while he drinks. Sorry, an ancient tribal tattoo does not a compelling big bad make.

Speaking of bad guys, though, season 10 gave us Rowena! And more Crowley material! And the Stynes—wait, no. We don’t talk about...whatever they were.

I do like Sam’s determination to save Dean, and I even like the underhanded methods he used to get the MoC off. Charlie’s death was a horrifying shock, but it actually fed the story very well. And I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about individual episodes, but Soul Survivor and Fan Fiction are both epic.

10 - Season 8

...this season. This season is such a mixed bag you could almost rank it as two separate seasons! ;) This was Jeremy Carver’s first season as showrunner—and while I like what he ended up doing, I hated the way he played with the brother dynamics throughout the season, especially the first half. Season 8 starts out disjointed, very unconnected from the previous season. The story thread of “Sam didn’t look for Dean” is overplayed and very tired. Also a bit of a reach, considering the season 5 finale. My point is, Sam and Dean both act like pod people for the first part of this season. Dean is mad at Sam for...doing exactly what Dean himself did a few years ago (fandom misses the nuance of Dean’s hypocrisy and jumps right in the blame-Sam boat with him) and Sam is suddenly...living with a strange woman we barely get to meet and okay with not hunting anymore?

This is another example of the skewed POVs hurting the show’s message. We don’t get to see Sam’s grief the same way we saw Dean’s struggle in purgatory, and since Sam’s Amelia arc makes very little sense anyway, we’re forced to imagine it—and this is a disservice to both Sam and the overarching story.

However, the saving grace of season 8 is the second half. We get the bunker, the Trials storyline, which is a whump goldmine for my Sam-loving heart, and one of the best season finales this show has ever produced. I mean...they got married. In a CHURCH! I’m not really a wincester, but seriously how do you not ship it just a little when the show gives you stuff like THAT?!

*deep breath* I’m good. Moving on!

9 - Season 13

I...have a soft spot for this season. Anybody who follows me on here can probably guess why. That’s right, it’s Jack, the greatest fanon projection the show has ever gifted us.

Let me explain. The narrative structure of the season is a mess. The exploratory theme of Sam and Dean as parents is derailed by the fact that Sam and Dean spend less than six episodes with their surrogate child and spend the rest of the season spinning their wheels until it’s time for the finale. Lucifer as a villain doesn’t give a crap about the protagonists, which makes him a really boring and terrible antagonist—to say nothing of the fact that two of the writers try to make him sympathetic and end up assassinating the character harder than Michael!Dean did. I only found Scoobynatural mildly entertaining. As for Asmodeus...who’s that?

Basically, the only shining light in this season besides the brothers is Jack. And we don’t even get a consistent characterization of him. He’s essentially a blank slate, which means we as fans and fanwork creators get to make him whatever we want. While he’s supposedly the Winchesters’ kid in canon, it’s rarely shown—that falls on us as fans to make a reality. And boy do we make it reality! This is where I found my corner of fandom, and that’s why this mess of a season ranks relatively high for me. Still in the bottom half, but it gave me one of the greatest gifts the show has ever given.

8 - Season 7

I shouldn’t have to defend myself, but while most of the fandom harbors a little black spot of hatred for this season...I don’t. Like, at all.

I don’t agree with all the creative choices of this season—the Leviathans were an out-of-nowhere big bad with no connection to the Winchesters. However, the guy who played Dick Roman did a fantastic job hamming it up. And I love how all the pieces came together in the end—Sam and Dean, Cas, Crowley, even Meg as a surprise reluctant hero. We also got Charlie! And Kevin! Bobby got a fantastic arc, both before he died and from beyond the grave. And Crowley, even though he helped win the day, also rigged the game so he took all the pieces left on the board. Mad respect for my king.

Also, as a stalwart fan of Sam whump, Sam’s hallucination storyline was all kinds of awesome. (Except for how it abruptly ended and was never spoken of again)

I know objectively this season isn’t very good, but I still find myself rewatching it a surprising amount. I have a soft spot for Sera’s storytelling, and she did not have complete control over the creative decisions for this year. Season 7 only barely misses out of the top half.

7 - Season 3

This season is great, it really is. I think the main reason I rank it so low is because of the shortened season—Sam’s aborted arc. And that was obviously out of everyone’s control; the creators had to just pick up the pieces and make do with what circumstances gave them.

Basically, I don’t have anything bad to say about this season. It’s a brother-lovefest, it gives us Bela and Ruby, and yes we get some truly great one-off eps. Bad Day at Black Rock, A Very Supernatural Christmas, Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello, and Ghostfacers are among my favorite episodes to rewatch. I just mainly miss the end of Sam’s arc. Although I do appreciate the writers’ strike giving us Castiel instead, I still wish we could’ve gotten to see boyking!Sam save his brother.

6 - Season 2

While on the surface season 2 is barely different than season 1, it also gives us loads of gamechangers. It’s the coming-of-age season—Sam and Dean aren’t kids anymore; in fact, they aren’t anyone’s kids. The season bookends of John’s death and Sam’s death make a horrible tragedy that I don’t even care much what’s in the middle.

But then again, everything in between is so good. There’s not much of an overarching story, just a sense of dread and desperation as...something...draws near. (We don’t even know what it is, but it still scares us! It’s masterful!) The tone is consistent and effective, the brother dynamics are still balanced enough to fully enjoy, and of course...there’s Playthings. :)

(Y’all are gonna stop believing me when I say I’m not a wincester, I can feel it. What can I say, I have incestuous shipping tendencies.)

5 - Season 11

This is a season that I could tear limb from limb for falling so flat in the end, but...somehow I can’t bring myself to. I didn't find myself into the Amara storyline too much, mainly because the God/Darkness sibling dynamic wasn’t developed enough to parallel with Sam and Dean invest in. But this season does an awesome job of healing the brother dynamics. While seasons 8, 9, and 10 were fight-heavy, Sam and Dean spend this season in relative peace. In times of potential crisis, they band together instead of fracturing apart. And that, honestly, is enough for me to forgive...well, a lot, plotwise. The Dean/Amara connection that went nowhere, the Casifer storyline that went nowhere, the Darkness’s grudge against her brother that...went nowhere...and I’m not even going to touch on the Sam/Lucifer dynamic that started out SO GOOD and then...well...

Again, I’m not going to touch on it. I love this season despite its flaws.

4 - Season 1

Here it is. The season that started it all. I said I was going to consider mostly narrative structures for this ranking, yet here season 1 is without much of a narrative structure, fourth from the top.

The first season of a show is always the feel-around-in-the-dark season. This is where we learn the rules of the show, how the world works, and most importantly, who our characters are. We spend 22 episodes with the writers and actors just...figuring out who Sam and Dean are, most especially who they are to each other. They were so successful in this that they spawned a fifteen year phenomenon centered around this fraternal love story. As an additional plus, since the characters were so new, season 1 gives us the most balanced POV between the brothers. We get to feel for both of them without being pitted against each other, and I appreciate that more than words.

The horror is old-school, the storytelling can be a bit cliche, but every show has an origin story and I’m in love with this one.

3 - Season 6

Again, I love Sera Gamble’s storytelling. It’s most evidenced here in her first year of showrunning. This season had the astronomical task of following up season 5. How do you follow up the literal apocalypse?

...Astoundingly well. To me at least.

This season’s narrative structure is my favorite. It’s kind of a noir thriller, with more twists and turns than Supernatural usually gets. In fact, having now watched Vampire Diaries and The Originals, season 6 of SPN kind of echoes those shows. (I don’t think it’s coincidence that TVD aired its first season one year prior to this)

Instead of trying to outdo the literal devil (the mistake of latter seasons) we spend most of season 6 not knowing who the big bad is. We meet a few baddies, get backstabbed by former friends, and we’re told Raphael is a threat, but in the end the big bad was the friend we made along the way—Castiel. It’s depressing, it’s not what we expected, and it’s honestly a departure from “traditional” SPN. But I like it. I like it a lot. If Sera had been allowed to do more seasons like this, she probably would’ve stayed longer.

2 - Season 4

I love a lot of things about this season. The way they handled the angels was great—the right way to do unknowably powerful beings. I like Sam’s dark arc. It’s coupled perfectly with his good intentions and his all-consuming love for his brother. The plot twist at the end is perfect—Sam, in doing the right thing, unleashes the worst evil this world has (yet) known.

The tone is also perfect. It’s dark. A little edgier. Edging toward eldritch horror rather than ghost horror. Balanced out with light episodes that pack a hard punch in the feels regardless. And this is a little thing, but the color grading shifts back to more sepia after the technicolor of season 3. It gives us this little sense of dread throughout the season without even knowing why.

I could complain about the skewed POVs, about how fandom still sometimes crows “Dean was right about Lilith!” when all Dean opposed was Ruby and the demon blood—he wanted killed Lilith too. But as this instance of POV-warp serves the storyline in a good, necessary way, and Sam truly did need to be brought back from his dark path, I’m choosing to ignore it.

1 - Season 5

Are we surprised? Maybe some Sam fans are—I know some who get vexed about the blame for the apocalypse being solely and constantly placed on Sam...but I’m not. The overall story of season 5 is just so good. Lucifer is a good villain in this season. Sam and Dean have an excellent healing arc. The angels are good villains, also ironic mouthpieces of the overarching themes—despite touting “fate” and “unavoidable,” they are champions of free will, since they do whatever they want in their father’s absence. Zachariah most notably. Castiel was utilized in a good way (whereas now he struggles to still have purpose in the show) Bobby and Crowley both were good in this season (and also sparked a rarepair that’s—hilariously—canon) and this season did not pull any punches when it came to death. Even the main protagonists were shot point-blank halfway through the season! (Don’t talk to me about the samulet, I can’t do it without bawling)

And Swan Song remains my favorite season finale and overall episode. Dean relinquishing control of his little brother, allowing him to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the world. I still halfway wish the series ended with Sam and Dean both throwing themselves into the Cage, destroying themselves for the world, out of love for each other. (insert “poetic cinema” meme)

And there we have it! To my mutuals, I’d love to hear your thoughts or your rankings. And to @letsgobethegoodguys - Steph, since this was so hard for you, I did it myself so I could feel your pain. 😘

[teamhawkeye]

So I’ve had a while now to reflect after finishing up the Far Cry New Dawn story

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

It...was a mixed bag overall. There were some things i liked - but there was a whole lot i didn’t like

The Good

The landscape. Hope County has always been gorgeous and it was nice to see it post-Collapse blooming and thriving for the most part

The music. Love it or hate it, it fit the Mad Max-esque theme the Highwaymen had going for them, both score and licensed soundtrack

Improvements in gameplay. Specifically with the GFH. I used Boomer almost exclusively in FC5 and two of my biggest complaints were 1.) he was not able to ride in vehicles with me and i felt bad making him run behind me everywhere and 2.) even with a ton of perks, he was very easily incapacitated by enemies. With Timber, they gave him the ability to ride in vehicles so you no longer have to feel bad about making him walk and they buffed him greatly in comparison to Boomer - he was often like a little walking tank and I greatly appreciated that they took those things into consideration and made tweaks there.

New Photo Mode. oh my god, YES. it still wasn’t perfect by any means, but my god, it was soooooo nice to be able to give your Captain life and emotion!

The Outpost system. Escalating difficulty so you could go back and still have a challenge even as you advanced your perks and weapons was a nice touch, so things never got too easy or stale in that area

Expeditions. It was fun being able to leave Hope County for a bit and see new locations and spend some time doing stuff other than milking the Outposts for ethanol

The Not-So Good

Abandoning characters from FC5. They may be dead and gone, but how are John and Faith and Jacob so glossed over? John maybe had the best fortune in nods to him and the last game, having both his ranch and bunker serve as important locations in New Dawn...but what about Faith and Jacob? Why was there no mention whatsoever to Eli, Whitehorse, Pratt, Hudson, or Dutch? And beyond the dead from FC5′s canon story, what about missing Resistance members? Jess Black, Wheaty, Tammy, Tweak...what happened to them? why were we given no closure on their stories at all? There was so little time spent reflecting on the events of the previous game or its characters - it very much felt like “they’re dead, not questions now, move on”...but the characters of the last game were a big part of what made it so great and it felt like a great disservice to the fans to have them swept under the rug like that.

Main story. I mean...what the fuck even was that last third part of the game??? The first third of the game started off on solid footing but it went off the rails well before the end. And there seemed to be a severe lack of cohesion between what we saw and learned in FC5 to what we see and learn in New Dawn. Joseph’s story about his daughter seems far less important knowing he had some bastard son hanging around one of the bunkers the whole time - why was there never any allusion to him whatsoever? He certainly felt shoehorned in as a result. And how is it one of the Big rules of Eden’s Gate was “no fornication” but Joseph can get away with it? That doesn’t line up with the antagonist we faced off with all of FC5. And what was with the magic??? Like, there was a touch of that in FC5 with the Bliss and the scope of just what it could do...but a ton of the Bliss’s power could be argued to be auditory and visual hallucinations. There was just straight up...magic to explain some of the weird things they included in New Dawn and it made that make some of it feel weak and hollow

Disservice to its villains. Mickey and Lou were done dirty, it’s just that plain and simple. Ubisoft didn’t give them much of anything to do and wasted all their potential. One of the main draws of FC5 was just how good the villains were and one of the largest complaints i saw from FC5 was just how much more interaction we all wanted with them. New Dawn gave their villains a backseat to almost everything else going on in the game. Mickey and Lou almost felt detached from the story at times. With the FC5, one of the best things about the Seeds was how connected they felt to everything you did: they met you face to face a number of times, radioed in constantly to taunt and harass you, upped the ante when you put the heat on them...with Mickey and Lou, it never felt like they actually took you seriously. Or didn’t even care, despite saying otherwise. They address you directly maybe once all game aside from when you have cutscenes with them face-to-face. Their strongest moment was in their defeat and it showed what major potential they had as antagonists - and to be sympathetic as well - and Ubisoft really blew it there and that’s one of the biggest shames

Disservice to its new characters. The new Resistance/Survivor characters got shafted too. You could easily go all game without knowing a single thing about any of the new GFH or Specialists for Prosperity - there’s just not the time to really get to know them or even like them all that much. Rush was certainly built up...to only be kidnapped and potentially left untouched for quite some time and when you go to rescue him, he’s sidelined immediately with very little interaction with him thereafter. His death wasn’t nearly as poignant as Eli or Virgil’s from FC5 - those were two characters who were constantly talking in your ear or available to talk to and help progress the story along. Rush was put there simply to die and give the Captain motivation to keep going and it’s a damn shame since he deserved better - don;t get me wrong, I liked him and was affected by his death, but the emotional impact there is just not as strong when Ubisoft gave him so little time or opportunity to really get close to him like previous installments did with characters. 

Expeditions. I know i said this was a good thing - and largely it is - but it was so small and underused, it was such a letdown. They kinda touted Expeditions as being a replacement for Arcade of FC5, which made me think there was going to be a ton of locations to explore and replay...but in reality, you got like 6 maps and that’s all. Maybe they’ll add more, but that seemed like that got hyped up for nothing

Scale. I get that this was a smaller game, reflected in the time it took to crank it out and the lower price, but god does it feel small. You can almost count how many missions there are on two hands. There were so few collectibles or side missions - idk what’s supposed to be the draw after finishing the main story when you have virtually nothing left to do. And beyond the game’s play length, the map was chopped in half and it was bullshit, quite frankly. Why the hell is the Bliss so concentrated now up in Jacob’s region - shouldn’t that have been the Henbane, since that’s where it was focused and created and still polluted the water there even after destroying Faith’s bunker? It felt cheap to carve off chunks of the map under the guise of “oooh, radiation zone! turn back!” We should have been allowed to explore the remains of Faith’s and Jacob’s bunker, of the Wolf’s Den, or finally be allowed inside the Veteran’s Center! Or go back to the chopper crash site on Joseph’s compound, the truck where Hudson, Pratt, and Whitehorse died on Dutch’s Island, or the truck Burke crashed into the river in the Henbane - all were completely gone and that felt super cheap, like they made no lasting impact when they were such huge moments in FC5. I feel like the two things most of us were excited to do when we learned we were returning to Hope County were learning about what happened to the characters of FC5 and seeing references to those who were lost and then to be able to explore and investigate every corner of the map we had in the previous game to see how the landscape how changed in every place we once knew so well.

Replay value. Honestly, aside from a second playthrough to sweep up achievements/trophies i didn’t get the first time around, i’m not all that inclined to keep the game installed on my console’s harddrive and replay it. If anything, playing this game has reminded me of everything i loved so much about FC5 and made me homesick for it - i’m already yearning to return to pre-Collapse Hope County and i haven’t even been done with New Dawn for 24 hours. It’s a shame when i so love the story that spawned this sequel, but it doesn’t possess any of the heart and soul that the original has.

There’s probably more i’m forgetting, but i’ve been typing for a while now and my brain has called it quits. I just know i went in with too high of expectations and was always going to be disappointed when New Dawn didn’t measure up to FC5...but it fell so short and that is the biggest issue i have. It could have been so much more and that’s the real tragedy

[austinsirkin]

“The Blue Door Symbolizes Sadness”: Lies Your English Teach Told You

It seems to have become a point of shared American culture that Gen-X’ers and Millennials hate how they were taught literature in high school. Nearly everyone from those generations has the memory of sitting in English class, listening to their teacher explain how something in a book meant something that seemed ridiculous, especially if said teacher was explaining that some minor detail, such as the color of a door, was a part of an elaborate plan by the author to express something incredibly subtle. As a result, many of those students came to feel that literary analysis was stupid, and honestly, I can’t blame them. However, today I’m going to explain why literary analysis is important, and why you’re right to hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

Who Were Your English Teachers?

I’m going to go ahead and throw high school English teachers under the bus, metaphorically speaking. I apologize in advance if you’re a high school English teacher and are reading this (I love you, you’re under-appreciated, and you do important work), but nevertheless it has to be done.

I’m not currently aware of the education levels of high school teachers around the country at the moment, but back in the 80′s, 90′s, and 00′s, the vast majority of high school teachers, especially in English, did not have post-graduate educations. The only requirements to teach in high school were to have either a Bachelor’s degree in the field you wanted to teach, or a Bachelor’s degree in education. In some places you didn’t even necessarily need that, and you could just get a certification. I say this not to diminish teachers themselves, but because it’s important to bear in mind when considering what these teachers said in their classes that they were not experts in these fields. Most of the time, they were teaching from a primer of sorts, which effectively told them what to say. These were the “teacher versions” of the textbooks you had in high school, which came with footnotes containing not just solutions to problems or answers to questions, but general knowledge that would be useful for a teacher to know.

So really, the people who wrote those books that your teachers used are the ones responsible for this whole mess. In that sense, it’s not your teacher’s fault, and you shouldn’t hold it against them; if we’d required advanced degrees in order for someone to be a high school teacher, there’d be teacher shortages all over the country. At least, that was the case a decade or two ago.

While I don’t know exactly who was responsible for writing all of those textbooks, my best guess is that whoever it was, they wrote them a long time ago. I mean, after all, it’s not like Shakespeare’s works have changed in the last few hundred years, right? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is still going to be “The Scarlet Letter” a hundred years from now. Right?

Well, not exactly. And that brings us to my second point.

Living in the Past

While specific works don’t change over time (with some notable exceptions including translations and multiple published versions), our understanding of them certainly does. For example, if you’d asked someone to analyze “Romeo and Juliet” in 1597, I guarantee you that their analysis would be markedly different from our analysis today; it’s well known that his plays were seen as common entertainment of the time, rather than high-brow performances for the educated only.

This is important to note, because the field of literature analysis and criticism is a constantly-evolving, changing environment, and what’s most relevant to this article is the idea of “author intent”. This is what lots of us learned in high school, and hated; the idea that by picking apart certain details of a given work, we could discern the intent of the author, where we assumed that every detail was consciously chosen to represent something. For example, as in the name of this article, that the author intended for a blue door to symbolize sadness. Or for a green light to symbolize greed.

The problem with this was that as anyone who has ever written anything knows, sometimes you just choose things arbitrarily*. Note the asterisk there, as we’ll come back to this later.

As a result, the idea of considering author intent was largely abandoned by literary scholars in the 1960′s, so the fact that it was still being taught to high school classes as late as the 00′s (and maybe even still today, but I’m out of touch with high school educations of the 10′s) is not just ridiculous, but rather deplorable. It did a disservice to multiple generations of students, and turned them off to something that’s a precious skill of tremendous importance: reading. Reading critically, specifically.

If you hated the idea of being told what the author thought, or what something symbolized in a book in high school, you were probably right, and your teacher was wrong. As the 20th century went on and the field of psychology developed, literary scholars came to realize that not all decisions in a book were conscious choices by the author. However, that doesn’t mean that those choices have no significance whatsoever. Remember that asterisk up above when I said that things were chosen arbitrarily? Well, we’ve come to understand that when it comes to a creative work, nothing is truly arbitrary, as the human subconscious is full of all sorts of weird things just waiting to get out. So if, for example, you’re writing a story and choose to use a blue door, that may not necessarily mean that you consciously intended for it to represent sadness. Instead, perhaps the scene in question reminded you of an experience you had as a child, where there was a blue door, and you drew upon that as you wrote. If someone were to ask you, “Why did you make this door blue?” you’d likely respond, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really mean anything,” but the reality is that it DOES mean something, it just wasn’t an intentional choice. The author made a correlation in their own subconscious that informed their work, and we may never be able to know exactly why that choice was made.

Thus, the deeper we delve into the idea that the author doesn’t necessarily consciously control every element of their work, the more we undermine the idea of the author as an expert of their own work. That’s why in modern literary analysis, scholars will explicitly ignore things that an author says about their own work (in most cases), and why we don’t usually ask authors questions like “what does this mean?” anymore.

That’s because there’s been a larger paradigm shift in our understanding of literature; we’ve shifted from using literature to explore the one specific person who wrote it to instead using literature to explore humanity. That is, to explore everyone who isn’t the author. And as every reader of a given text has a unique set of experiences and associations, there are huge numbers of possible readings of any single given work.

Often, scholars will perform a reading of a work according to a given critical framework, such as a feminist reading, where they read the text for feminist themes, or a Marxist reading, where they read the text for classist themes. But these themes all exist separately and together all at once, and there’s no longer any misapprehension that we’ve “solved” a text, and have come up with the single, unchanging meaning of the work. That’s because the things that are important about a given work aren’t the things that the author intended to put in it, but the things that the readers took away from it.

What’s It All For, Though?

Thanks, I’m glad you asked! Seriously, though, what’s the point of studying literature from 1597 or 1895 or whatever? You probably thought something like, “I understand why we should read these things in order to understand the greater context of the works of today, but why do we need to analyze them? It seems like a waste of time, and like it doesn’t accomplish anything.”

Well, I can see why you’d feel that way. Performing a poststructuralist analysis of a novel from the 1800′s, for example, may not seem like it accomplishes much. No one is going to use that analysis to stop people going hungry, or create peace in the world. Then again, neither will most work done in America.

What literary analysis does, though, is provide insights into humanity itself, and our search for meaning, not just of our own lives, but of the human condition. Learning it in high school helps guide students toward critical, self-evaluative thinking in a way that no other class does. When there’s no “right” answer, students need to be able to evaluate a text, identify correlative elements, and create an argument around them. That’s a valuable skill on its own.

What’s even more exciting is that as you progress in literary criticism, you come to understand that a “text” is more than just a book. A video game can be a text. A TV show. Even a billboard. Or a chair. Anything created by humans is something that can be analyzed and interpreted. So literary criticism is sort of a middle ground between philosophy and anthropology; it studies things that humans have made, and asks the question, “What does this mean?”

If you don’t care what things mean, and how the things surrounding you in your life fit together into a framework that helps explain who we are, where we are, and where we’re going, then cool. You don’t have to, and that’s fine. But that’s what literary analysis is for, and maybe now you understand why people want to do it. I hope, too, that you can forgive your English teacher for lying to you; they likely didn’t know they were doing it, and they were probably just trying to do their best to help you learn and grow as a person.

Also, you can abandon your dreams of going back in time to ask an author what they meant in the hopes of proving your teacher wrong. You can now prove them wrong without going anywhere at all!

[vroenis]

Art Created For Mood

I was watching a YouTuber I really like playing a game I really don’t like but from a developer that I also don’t like who does a thing I actually really like. That’s an opening and a half, but bear with me.

I don’t know if this book is good or not, but it’s here for the puns, and so am I. So is Max Kornell, it appears. I sure hope he’s an alright guy cos his children’s book is on my tumblr for a visual gag now.

It doesn’t matter what the game was, and it so happens it was DLC - some of you will be able to figure out what it was once I describe it, but very early on in the gameplay minutes of proceedings, the developers have the player-protagonist/avatar and your companion-of-the-moment engage in messing about in an old, abandoned fancy-dress store, picking up costumes and masks and larking about. I appreciate the YouTuber in question may have been partially or wholly playing up to the streaming audience ever-present at the time when they impatiently remarked “is this all we’re going to do” and “when do we get to actually play the game” etc., “when does the game start?” and so on, but as you may remember in my commentary on the Uncharted games a while back, interactions like these to someone like me are most often the most important - and now there’s no question what the game is if you haven’t figured it out already. As a side-note, I think the problem in this particular instance is one of pacing, and cold-opening the DLC with a scene like this may have been the issue. Video game pacing is tricky, tho, so it’s difficult to consider whether most players would be playing this content months after having experienced the main game, or whether the majority of players will be those who will have purchased it fresh on the newest generation of hardware, given the title actually launched a whole console iteration ago. Assuming that might be the case, the pacing experience might be entirely different, but I’m getting side-tracked.

I can’t account for what the YouTuber/Streamer was thinking and I don’t want to throw any shade and suggest they may have been performing for their audience - even if they were, it’s still fine - Streaming is performance, I feel like that much should be clearly evident. It’s not important to me where the truth lies within that individual. What the exterior performance telegraphs tho, is perhaps a misunderstanding of what the purpose of a scene like that is. I realise that in games that feature frequent occurrences of brutal violence, tension, excitement and anxiety, scenes of levity and peacefulness offer reprieve and introspection. They’re effective because of context and their rarity lends them power.

I’m still here to say a whole game of those kinds of things can still be powerful, you just have to be intelligent about the context. Reframing maturity to mean something other than violence takes real intelligence. It makes me question just how many actual adults we have developing video games. No, I don’t hate to bring it up again, but you need to play Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs and a myriad of other Twine games and many other games created in queer spaces to perhaps broaden your understanding of what adults create when they don’t look to violence as a banner for maturity.

Naturally I’m going to turn to the most cliched of mediums; film.

For which I won’t apologise. That’s a frame from the montage in the middle of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 movie Kōkaku Kidōtai - Ghost In The Shell, based on Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name. I’d like to say that frame or the set of frames it’s taken from is one of my favourites from the film, because it is, but to be honest, the entirety of the three and a half minute montage is absolute perfection and every frame is equally important. It encapsulates the essence of the film without a single line of dialogue by playing a haunting piece of music expertly crafted by Kenji Kawai and showing seemingly disjointed images of the city in which the film is set. The film’s protagonist does appear in several shots, and some frames exhibit the city in decay, but some are completely urbane and simply show life in ordinary existence. Without discussing the main text of the film further, suffice to say it is the perfect frame for the subject of the narrative without stating it.

Before I embed the Ghost In The Shell montage, however, I want to share one Oshii created 2 years before it in Patlabor 2: The Movie. Let’s watch that one together, and even if you’ve not seen the film yourself, note in particular how topical the images are today, if you’re reading this some time around July 2020.

For those who’ve not seen the film, I highly recommend it. It’s not necessary to have seen either the series or the first Patlabor movie. It may help a little to watch the first film, mostly just to familiarise yourself with characters and terminology, but it’s not a necessity. The first film is much more comedic and while the second still has its funny moments, as evidenced in this montage, it takes a much more dramatic and sombre turn. Various domestic terrorist and military activities cause a declaration of martial law in Tokyo at roughly the mid-point of the film at which point this montage appears. The depictions of the citizenry, their interaction with the military and vice-versa are particularly interesting, and the film’s commentary as a whole is fascinating. That this has for the most part been lovingly and agonisingly rendered by hand in stunning animation detail is amazing.

Feelings are wonderful, weird, oddly shaped things. We use a lot of words in our lives, pragmatically to communicate, to instruct, to describe and tell stories. Funnily enough, when I was deeply entrenched in video games culture doing podcasts, playing a lot of games and writing a lot more about game studies etc., there was a lot of writing about the place about game verbs and it’s a great synthesis of design - a tool for describing the most simple actions in a game; move, jump, shoot, collect, talk, choose etc. In my introductory example, there are still a lot of verbs in play, like move, but the one most absent is of-course shoot, and the one that comes to the fore is talk. I feel like the scene at the beginning of that DLC is wholly intended to create a sense of atmosphere, to evoke certain feelings. Is it there to set the scene for context later on? Maybe. Is it for reprieve from violence? Also possible. But perhaps it’s just there to be relished, to be indulged. Maybe it’s OK to just be there to be felt, because feeling it is good, or even just feeling it is feeling something. Maybe it doesn’t have to be good, it’s just a different feeling to the way we feel when we’re reading an action feedback-loop where we’re engaged in move/shoot/wait/don’t die/melee/die-reload-repeat.

It’s hard for me to separate these montages from the films they come from. I want to say they’re powerful outside of the films, but I’ve seen those films so my viewings and re-viewings of them are loaded with my memories of the entire work; I have the full context. Tempted as I am to embed the montage from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, I think that would be spoiling you too much, plus the film in its entirety really warrants a full viewing. Kenji Kawai’s music in the second film along deserves maximum volume and your time uninterrupted, so I won’t demean it with a tiny little window and a wall of text. I promised you the montage from the first GitS movie, so here it is, at three and a half minutes.

I’m using the word feel quite a lot in this entry and it’s intentional. In recent times, we seem to be de-emphasising our feelings somewhat and I’m all for some semblance of rationality and logic but emotions are important. Feelings are amazing - all of them. The ones that are good, the ones that are uncomfortable, the ones that are uncontrollable. I guess some folks try to talk about understanding feelings and there’s a little truth in that but I don’t think it’s something we can ever fully get a complete hold of, nor should we. I’m not here to attempt to provide you guidance on that, I think if you’re reading this, you’re well capable of gauging for yourself what the impact is of your emotions to your life and what you may need to do about it. Don’t read an implication that I mean to diminish their impact, either - you may well need to amplify their impact, I think a lot of people don’t consider that - now more than ever, but again, I wouldn’t know. You would. Only you do.

Anyway - I feel like a lot of art and moments in art, or sections of art, are being misinterpreted or criticised because people aren’t open to the intent. Again I come back to the example in the opening to this entry. Assuming on good faith that the YouTuber’s/Streamer’s behaviour was genuine, their reading of the activity in the game was that it was somehow not game, and that until there was either shooting or puzzling or adventuring of some kind, that those things would be actually game or real gameplay does that scene and activity a disservice. Of-course, maybe they just straight-up didn’t like it which is fair. I accept that, I guess - but I don’t like it.

It still bothers me tho. Even tho I really don’t like that game, I understand that the point of it is to ground the narrative in very human roots, in emotional engagement so that the character has something to celebrate, to cherish fondly, or even perhaps to regret or look back on with bitterness or anger. Regardless - even if it doesn’t have a payoff in the future, I still feel like it’s important as a representation of human behaviour in a game in which human avatars are depicted. The images on screen within that video game are for the most part not abstract. The themes shown and the narrative woven about their journey, their motivations, the justifications for their actions and the moralising therein within the fictional framework of the universe are all extremely human and intended to be analogous to the real human experience. 

That being the case, on that assumption, I’m surprised and even more disappointed that there aren’t more non-violent indulgences of peaceful human interactions on offer in these games.

People’s tastes in films, I guess, has been quite monolithic for some time. I mean, I’ve always had the throw-away semi-casual assumption of such but I didn’t think it was a real thing. I appreciate I’m into some fringe stuff and I don’t expect most people to get into the super-weird films, but that folks would be so narrow? Like... so narrow. I’ve said it before, I’m well accustomed to the art I’m into being heavily criticised by most people, but even the more approachable material I’m into, people seem to either struggle to digest or still regard as boring because it doesn’t register on some level of excitement that scales on a weird, reductive verb-o-meter not dissimilar to video games designed with the fewest of verbs; move, shoot and collect. Sometimes a film isn’t necessarily about what’s literally happening on the screen, or strictly about the narrative playing out. Sometimes art is about how you feel when you experience it - we’ve quite literally been describing art, in particular music, as mood pieces for years, and for quite some time now, video games. 

In film, David Lynch is a master at it to name only one, and there are a ton of others. You don’t have to immediately have to be able to process his narratives, your first concern is to how you feel when you view his films. The pragmatics can - and often do - come later. Once you familiarise yourself with his cinematic language of emotional tone and atmosphere, you may find that his narratives are actually quite simple and they quite easily make sense - they’re artfully told and are injected with immense feeling because they’re told in such unique and emotional ways.

How do you go about choosing a frame from David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.?

I tend not to discuss general release films much - I don’t have any particular distaste for them at all, I’ve mentioned that I have a great appreciation for them but if there’s any way I can speak to the emotional responses I have to them, it’s that in a broader sense, most of my responses are more or less the same. That’s why I don’t really talk about them. Their impact to me and how I engage with art in my life is minimal. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re important in the world culturally or that I discount their cultural importance to others - not at all. If they’re important to you, then that’s wonderful and amazing and you should celebrate them. Nevertheless, there’s also a place for independent cinema and art and creating things that don’t directly speak to the most transparent of feelings. I understand that the audience is smaller and the financial availability is going to have to be smaller - that’s OK, but mood pieces are special and amazing and weird and sometimes indescribable and maybe you should give them a try because they can make you feel real strange and sometimes strange feelings can be powerful too.

Once in a while, some folks do make something that is super approachable and bridges that magical gap between indescribable emotion and mood, and audiences that need the most gentle of entry-points. I think Thatgamecompany’s video game Journey has to be one of the best examples of a work that transcends and overcomes a lot of barriers by removing so many obstacles not only typical of video games but art in general. It’s a truly gorgeous experience, and one that is uniquely evocative not only for its own but any medium.

While I’m sure there where throngs of mouth-breathers who flocked to reddit et al to decry Journey as NOTAGAME™, there were plenty of people who found themselves disarmed by its approach to play, playfulness, narrative and emotion. While you can watch a full play-thru video of the game, once-again I do encourage you to actually play the game itself altho so far from its release, there may be a critical component of the experience missing. A minor spoiler; central to the game is a sense of connection and yet separation. Lead designer Jenova Chen at the time was dismayed by online gaming behaviour and that engagement between players was so so toxic - it remains so today. He wanted a way for players to connect but not be able to be harmful and hateful to one another. The game will actually pair players together via online services, but there is no VOIP or text communication utility at all, nor can you see the username of whom you’re liked to. There is almost no way to communicate, save for a single button that will emit a musical note and an abstract symbol above your character’s head - that’s it. Beyond that, you may freely move about the world together, choosing to follow one-another or separate and ignore each other. That is the extent of interaction, and when the game launched in 2012, we discovered this together as a community - it was amazing and breathtaking, especially as the whole experience unfolded.

If Jenova Chen and his team at Thatgamecompany can teach people who usually shoot heads that moods can be engaged in and enjoyed with Journey, I feel like people have the ability to identify all forms of art that does the same. Art that deviates from the usual MO of fulfilling our usual roster of base needs. I’m not denigrating mass-market art by describing base needs -  not at all. Base needs are hella important, but if the violence in The Last of Us gives the reprieve of giraffes context, surely the base needs of mass-market art does the same for mood pieces?

This is a frame from Exit (2011) directed by Marek Polgar and you should 100% find it and watch it.

These are some of the more fringe works I’m into, if you’re particularly daring. I’ve no doubt that someone will find them pedestrian and that’s fine. At some point, tho, people have to be able to either go to a shop a buy it, or at least find it online somewhere, so I’m sure the video your mate from uni made is the highest of couture art, but if no-one other than you and ten friends have seen it, it legit doesn’t count ay.

By the way - these are all listed in Film Notes, but I’ll lazylink their IMDB pages here so you can see how bad their audience scores are.

Tokyo.Sora (come-on, it’s my favourite film of all time) Exit (OK so as much as I was being facetious just before, this is going to be difficult to track down, but worth it if you can) Womb (CW: incest) The Sky Crawlers (my favourite of Mamoru Oshii’s) The Limits Of Control To The Wonder (I know - Malick, but I feel like if you’re going to try one, try this - shorter, more intimate, less abstract - I find it’s his most tender) Holy Motors (be thankful I’m linking Carax and not Noé/Void or Climax)

[shadows-of-almsivi]

Ooc: For mun, which is the order of tamriel races for you from least to most favorite?

((Goddamn, anon, you’re asking the tough questions. 

A deep and frankly probably-unhealthy attachment to TES 3 leads me to put Dunmer as my top favorite race, as you’d expect considering I’ve run one for nearly 3 years at this point. The culture’s implicit reverence for and acceptance of gender variance is a major selling point, as well as the development concepts of self-made enlightenment and DIY divinity, and a very practical and demonstrable afterlife. Post-Tribunal, there’s likely no larger or more complex cultural system of organised Daedra worship, and that’s always fascinating to me.

A shallower answer, I know, but Khajiit were my first favorite, long before I knew a damn thing about TES lore: it was actually an image of a Khajiit on the back cover that made me first pick up TES3 out of a sale bin, back in 2003. Who wouldn’t love big fluffy catmen? Even their awkward digitigrade walk cycles in TES3 hold an odd sense of fondness to me. Later, the intricacies of body types and a delightful cultural sense of humor made me fall in love with them all over again. I’m hoping for a TES game set entirely or partially in Elsweyr, as much of a pipe dream as that may be considering Modern Bethesda’s anthropocentrism.

Probably surprising for anyone that doesn’t know me particularly well, but I really, really dig Bosmer. I find their culture fascinating and personally relevant, and I’ve written a few things on them (that have sadly been mostly lost to time and server resets on other boards). I adore the idea of an obligate-carnivore society, and could spend hours speculating on its workings and how it interplays with their Khajiiti neighbours. Ritual cannibalism is really interesting in general, and especially how it affects a culture’s military behavior. Sure would be nice if we ever got to actually see that played out in-game, Bethesda. Instead of copping out yet again and leaving three quarters of your lore existing only in in-game books with no reflection in the game world, Bethesda. Almost like the creators aren’t brave enough to actually do most of the things they’ve come up with, Bethesda–*

Argonians! I love Argonians. There is so much potential with Argonians, even if they usually get the short end of the stick in regards to representation and development (see above micro-rant). But that lack of detail can also be a blessing! Being notably ~mysterious~ as a recurring theme, they’re a veritable breeding ground for headcanons. There’s really nowhere you can’t go with them and still make it work. They’re lizards, they’re people, they’re sentient tree children. They’re potentially a race of sleeper cells for an unknowably-alien communal overmind that allowed their capture and slavery so as to spread them unnoticed throughout the world in their independent, dormant states… Fun! They’re really, really fun! 

Orcs, I don’t really have a lot to say about them. I just like them. There’s always more they could do with them, but on the other hand, they’ve also been built up and explored quite well considering the isolationist nature of their traditional culture. I always like to see more focus on them (and I want to know where their giant woolly caterpillars went), and their loyalty and bravery is a beautiful inversion of the prejudices against them. They’re fierce and blunt and straightforward, and their history is as interesting as it is kind of heartbreaking. There is a lot to love about Orsimer, about a people that took their cursed abandonment by the Divines and turned it into a source of strength and culture. I’d be fascinated to see more development with them: their cultural feelings towards the Dunmer, for example, since their origins are inextricably joined. Or how they feel about Skyrim as a country, considering they may have been in Skyrim longer than the Nords (depending on sources).

Redguards and Bretons are kind of tied for me, because they’re both really fascinating in theory and history but usually poorly represented in-game as generic Here Are Some More Humans. And there’s really nothing generic about either of them, so it’s quite a disservice. Redguards have some truly fascinating lore behind them, which I would love to dig further into (sadly, I cannot for the life of me get Redguard to run, I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong), with shades of so many cultural and mythological inspirations that melt together really nicely: sword-saints, oceanic legacies, desert cities and a vibrant, completely-other pantheonic structure with flecks of classic pirate tales and Haitian-esque influences here and there. Bretons, despite their basic ubiquity, should be far more elaborate and weird than they generally are: you have Fantasy Frenchmen with High Elf blood, forging incredibly complex and volatile dynasties that influence the fashions and high society of the Empire while also seeming to be always at war with itself, building nobility and identity as a race of hybrids, blending elven and human disparities into a fiercely-held cultural whole. This should be super weird and incredibly fascinating; sadly, they usually don’t get that Keep Tamriel Weird treatment they really deserve. They usually end up as Bland High-Fantasy Humans, despite everything about them being amazing.

You’re probably noticing that I don’t really have disliked races, I mostly just have races whose depictions disappoint me. Imperials are the epitome of that for me. Maybe I just expect an unrealistic level of detail, I don’t know. Despite TES4 being arguably my favorite TES game to play (TES3 is my favorite in general, but I would never call TES3′s control and combat mechanics perfect by any stretch of the imagination. ‘Oblivion’ nailed the balance for me, so I play that more than the others), I was never very impressed with the Imperials, and that was their game. The Imperials sorely lack that Greco-Roman vibrancy they need, and their cultural worldbuilding left a lot to be desired, falling back into Bland High-Fantasy Humans instead of delving into the truly goddamn weird things that exist in the lore for them. A nation of ex-slaves still living in the ruined shadows of their fallen masters, their highest saint (probably) gave birth to the minotaurs they then drove away into the wilderness for… basically no reason, the intense political intrigue and shady military cover-ups. A nation of slaves broke a time god, built an Empire, and basically took over the world with diplomacy and by force, how did this manage to be so dull?

Nords…. I wanted to like the Nords. I really did. I always loved them in TES3, with their fantastically-hammy Brian Blessed voices and Braveheart facepaints and endless enthusiasm for battle and yurts. They were fairly simple, but there was a real life to them, and the way they described their home and their culture made me really wish I could see it. But time passed, and there wasn’t much added to how the Nords worked and what made them really special. They seemed to get less interesting as the games went on, more generic, more ordinary. They could have been something special in their own right, but it feels like in trying to mirror real life in a bid for realism, the Nords became a bland reflection of their sources rather than something vivid and unique.

Those are my opinions, anyway. I know I’m probably just picky.*: I’m not actually that aggressively salty about Modern Bethesda, I just get kind of exasperated sometimes. Knowing why something is the way it is and liking the way something is are completely different things.))

[terryblount]

One Piece: World Seeker – Review

When I first heard of One Piece: World Seeker, I remember thinking it was about time they brought one of Shonen Jump’s most widely-beloved exports to gaming. Unbeknownst to me, the now eight hundred and seventy-three episode anime has actually ventured into our industry numerous times over the last nineteen years. Some quick research revealed that One Piece has inspired several beat ‘em ups, fighting games, turn-based JRPG’s, action-adventure games, and even a baseball game.

Now the series has finally sailed the treacherous waters of the open world, sandbox genre. Veteran One Piece developers, Ganbarion, have yet again given players the chance to don the straw hat of protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, but this time with unparalleled freedom to explore, find collectables, and pummel hoards of marines with his iconic, elastic fisticuffs. Thanks to the power of modern platforms, and not least of all the might of the Unreal Engine 4, gamers have the chance to immerse themselves into Luffy’s adventures like never before.

Monkey D. Luffy, one of the most famous faces in anime.

So close, and yet so far. While there are merits to the idea of building a One Piece game out of a sandbox formula, I don’t think One Piece: World Seeker represents the ideal solution. The combat mechanics were relatively enjoyable, and it is obvious that the developers have put some serious elbow grease into the game’s visual representation. Nevertheless, the repetitive nature of side quests and the underwhelming attempt at world building simply did not take advantage of the rich and varied source material that is its namesake. This is simply not the game it should have been.

Watashi wa Luffy!

For the unfamiliar, One Piece is a long-running manga and anime series based around the escapades of Monkey D. Luffy, a pirate who seeks to obtain the eponymous ‘One Piece’ treasure. Whoever holds this legendary booty will be proclaimed as king of all the pirates, so the series is sort of like Treasure Island, but stretched to an encyclopedic length with the distinctive quirkiness and fanfare that only an anime can pull off.

Yet, Luffy’s whimsical straw hat and flip flops belie his true abilities because he accidentally ate the ‘Gum Gum’ devil fruit as a boy. The fruit made him stronger, highly resistant to enemy attacks, and enables him to stretch his body into extraordinary shapes much like Mrs Incredible or Mister Fantastic. With the power of his rubbery physique, Luffy sets sail on an epic treasure hunt across endless seas where he encounters new friends, gains crewmates, and confronts formidable enemies.

Eight hundred plus episodes later, and we have One Piece: World Seeker opening with our man being detained in a sky prison floating above a union of islands named ‘Prison Island.’ It seems Luffy allowed himself to be incarcerated as a distraction while the Straw Hats crew  break into a vault somewhere below. Unfortunately, the plan turned out to be a trap, resulting in Luffy bailing the flying fortress to escape the clutches of Isaac, the tyrannical warden of the whole region.

Isaac, the warden of prison island.

Once our hero crash lands on Prison Island, he befriends a new character called Jeanne, who eventually explains that the island’s populace has been split between Pro- and Anti-Navy factions in the aftermath of a protracted war. The Pro-Navy inhabitants live a life of comfort afforded by Isaac and the Navy as their new governors, while their counterparts struggle under their draconian regime.

Never one to turn a blind eye towards the troubles of the little people, our hero agrees to help Jeanne and the Anti-Navy resistance to rebel against their oppressors. As such, the player will take part in various missions such as reuniting Luffy with his crew, getting to know the colourful inhabitants of Prison Island, and steadily crippling Warden Isaac’s (literal) iron fists over the islands. Of course, you also get to beat up lots and lots of bad guys and bosses.

Missing the treasure in plain sight

One Piece: World Seeker’s setting is one of the most obvious links to its anime and manga roots. The narrative brings out the tried and trusted theme of Luffy stumbling upon a new island with a dilemma, and then going on a spontaneous adventure to assist the inhabitants with their struggles. It is the old, ‘good taking a stand against evil’ trope that has sustained the One Piece universe since its origins.

Moreover, fans should be pleased with how the writers have transitioned the characters and some cameos into the game from the One Piece chronology. Everything from their dialogue, to the depiction of the main villain feels like an authentic production from the central story line of One Piece. Considering that Eiichiro Oda, creator of the series, was involved, it is no wonder the game convinced me that I was playing through an actual episode of the anime during its best moments.

Nami, the resident thief of the straw hats. I cannot stop staring at her big… belt! Is she promoting Bitcoin!?

Unfortunately, it is also here where I began to notice how the gameplay of World Seeker ends up linking to the story in a rather shoehorned manner. After the tantalising opening cinematic of the narrative, most players would probably assume that Luffy will become the centre of a complex operation to overthrow Isaac. Instead, the game just falls into the same loop where he must travel to a certain location, and beat the crap of everyone he finds there.

Generally it boils down to you are at A, bad man at B. Go from A to B and remove bad man’s front teeth. World Seeker does try to mix things up with a few sections where you must infiltrate strongholds without being detected. As is usually the case with sandbox games that include ham-fisted stealth sections, they just feel like tacked on filler meant to lengthen your play time. It doesn’t take long for the gameplay to deteriorate from fun, to repetitive, to monotonous.

Gum Gum BAA-ZOO-KAAAA!

Luffy has a basic, three-hit combo that he can unleash upon thugs and navy soldiers, as well as his famous Gum Gum pistol serving as a ranged attack. There is also the option to sneak up on enemies either from behind or inside a barrel Metal Gear Solid style, which then creates the opportunity to perform stealth takedowns. It was rarely necessary to be stealthy though, since the bad guys are not only easy to kill, but sneaking around as Luffy just feels like a disservice to his character.

I must admit that the combat is very well animated, and fighting does a superb job at making you feel powerful. The camera also has the delightful habit of shifting to slow motion when you deliver the KO blow to the last man standing much like Batman and the Arkham games. Seeing the poor sod being launched slowly off a high building after receiving Luffy’s catapult fists was very entertaining… for the first fifty times I pulled it off at least.

Adding some variety is also the ability to switch between the blue and red ‘stances’ of combat on the fly. The red mode is essentially reserved for Luffy’s heavier, more focused attacks along with the ability to guard. Blue mode is faster and deals less damage, but the broad sweep of the attacks makes it appealing for confronting whole groups at a time. The dodge mechanic is also useful in this stance since you can zip out of the enemy’s reach if you need to.

While One Piece: World Seeker’s traversal fails to achieve the fluidity of recent super hero games, I thought that the mechanics of swinging and propelling my way through the game’s surprisingly big open world was implemented nicely. Like the combat, you really feel the forces at work in Luffy’s special ability, and it became a particularly exciting system once there were some high trees and buildings around me.  I even managed to gain a bit of fun out of collecting the overabundance of pointless loot scattered throughout the world.

To my dismay, the majority of the side quests have actually been built around this idea of collecting random loot items for citizens of Prison Island. I was horrified to catch myself looking for small flowers at the request of a random man standing near a wooden shed, or finding pieces of copper for a random little kid. Why must I do favours for bland-faced NPC’s who the game does not even bother to introduce to me? This sort of meaningless filler has no place in a One Piece game; I’d rather go looking for Riddler trophies.

At least the game is generous in dishing out experience points from these meaningless exploits. You can use said points to purchase new blue or red fighting moves, or you can spend them on Luffy’s traversal abilities and health points. However, let us not forget that One Piece has had an entire manga and anime saga to build up Luffy’s resume of moves. Does it really make sense hiding them behind experience points which can only be gained by grinding away at meaningless loot quests? No, it doesn’t.

It feels Unreal how much I love this game engine

Sorry about that atrocious pun, but sweet mother of monkey milk this game is pretty. I am not sure why many studios from the Land of the Rising Sun have made the Unreal Engine 4 their engine of choice lately, but World Seeker is yet another example of what a brilliant move this was. Just like the anime, this game is so colourful and vivid that I bet it would cure a defective monitor from stuck pixels.

This game can be seriously beautiful at times.

I cannot deny that the environments were eerily empty at times, nor can I look past at the lack of variety in enemies. However, the character animations, the sheer scale of some buildings, the beautiful landscapes and the particle effects really captivated me on a visual level. Honestly, if Toei Animation did an entire episode in these graphics I would be happy, and I cannot imagine better aesthetics for a One Piece video game.

If only for more time

What struck me from the moment I launched One Piece: World Seeker is that this game feels unfinished. There is nothing overtly broken in its mechanics, and certain elements of the gameplay are undeniably polished. Yet, the lack of voiced cut scenes, the general empty feeling of the world, the repetitive nature of the side missions, and using the same models for most of the enemies are all the tell-tale signs of a studio being pushed for time.

In fact, the stark contrast between the excellent visuals and the bland mission design makes me suspect Ganbarion had plans to make World Seeker more like a JRPG. In any case, it is clear that their plans never came to fruition and they settled on making a more fast-paced, open world game from what they had already finished.

If you are looking to play a good One Piece game, I suggest you look at any of the Pirate Warrior instalments, because World Seeker just feels like too much of a mixed bag. This is not the kind of game we want from this beloved series at this point in time, and playing it makes it clear that the developers share our sentiments. If, one the other hand, you don’t own a PS3, wait for a sale. There is still fun to be had with this game, even if it is very short lived.

Beautiful cut scenes

Graphics and sound design

Story fits the universe

Sterile world design

Very bland side quests

Too many collectables

Insipid mission design

Upgrades locked behind XP

          Playtime: 22 hours total. For the single player campaign and light grinding

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using Nvidia GTX 1070, i5 4690K CPU, 16GB RAM – Played using an Xbox One Controller

One Piece: World Seeker – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[optimisticheartbarbarian-blog]

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