#adding things to the narrative that echo backward and forward

[mylordshesacactus]

Today on Posts That Will Serve As A Blocklist but whatever:

It's genuinely at the point where people who act all dismissive and superior about the Star Wars animated series, and ESPECIALLY of Ahsoka specifically as a character--snidely dismissing anything that involves TCW-original characters or arcs--are just. Objectively hysterically wrong.

Like.

Phantom Menace released in 1999.

Revenge of the Sith was six years later, in 2005.

TCW started airing in 2008. Ahsoka started existing in the narrative literally three years after RotS dropped.

Even if you start counting as far back as you possibly can, back in TPM (wherein Anakin was an actual baby), the prequel era only existed at all without her for nine years.

Ahsoka Tano has been a narratively significant, load-bearing major protagonist of the Star Wars franchise for, as of this post, sixteen (16) years. Very nearly twice as long as her era ever existed without her! At this point, if you are determined to act like she's some handwavey 'new' star war idea whose impact on the living tapestry of the GFFA can be easily dismissed, that's...

...like, full offense but that's kind of on you, man.

[chuuyrrkisser]

A revised narrative.

— summary… It was supposed to be a regular Tuesday morning, you should be in college running to your next class and pray there were no assignments forgotten but here you were, isekaied to the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but cold snowed plane unable to move because your limbs are buried in the thick blanket of snow.

But hey, at least you were in your favorite anime– oh never mind, it's bungo stray dogs, you are so dead...

— content… dazai osamu/reader, chuuya nakahara/reader, reader has an ability, Dazai—typical suicide mentions, slow burn, slow updates, angst, angst with happy ending, because I can’t write angst endings, isekai and transmigration…

— chapter 2/?

Your nails dug into the coat as you wrapped it close to your body to protect you from the freezing weather. Dazai insisted that he'd give you a pair of boots, but you were not looking forward to owing the mafia member any more than you already did.

In your defense, you could hand over the coat to him later, and it wouldn't be as awkward as giving him back a pair of boots. How were you going to give it back? Were you supposed to hold on to your school shoes? If you left them behind, you had to give back the boots later and walk with socks like a weirdo. That was too much even for you, so you shut down the offer and stuck to clinging onto the coat like it was your lifeline. The worst part was probably that you had to walk by foot all the way out of the snowy plane to a roadside.

You followed Dazai as he strode purposefully toward the roadside, where a sleek black car awaited, its dark windows gleaming ominously in the winter sun. He paused beside the door, glancing back at you, and you felt a surge of urgency to pick up your pace, nearly jogging over to him as he opened the door.

As you slid into car, your gaze was immediately drawn to a strange box on the middle seat, its presence blocking you from moving in comfortably. You reached for the box but just as your fingers were about to brush it, a tranquil voice interrupts, "That's a bomb." instinctively jerking back, a wave of panic washed over you as you screeched turning your back to exit only to find the door slamming shut right in your face.

You fumbled with the handle, but it was child locked, and your frantic shaking only added to your dread. Just then, the opposite door swung open, and you were met with Dazai's amused smirk, a sight that should have been comforting but instead sent shivers down your spine.

"I'd advise you not to make any contact with it," he said casually, as if discussing the weather, before closing his door with a soft click that seemed to echo in the silence of the car.

The entire ride was terrifying as you pressed yourself against the car door, trying to calm your mind away from thoughts of the bomb and the sociopath sitting just a few inches away from you. Every little bump in the road made you jump, and you swore that the only thing keeping you from having a breakdown was the sheer terror that any sudden movement could set off the device, turning you into the star of a very gruesome scene.

Horrified, you reflected on the absurdity of your situation: you had transmigrated into a world where the first person you encountered was a literal textbook sociopath, and to make matters worse, it was Dazai in his mafia era. It was practically official that you were dead meat, and the only way to escape this nightmare was to bend over backward and pray for a miracle.

Your thoughts spiraled so deeply that you didn't even notice when the car came to a stop in front of the Port Mafia building. Dazai was the first to exit the vehicle, and you could see him waiting patiently beside your door, a mischievous glint in his eye that made your heart race with both fear and confusion. You took a deep breath, trying to center yourself as you opened the door and nearly toppled over, only to be caught by Dazai's steady hand.

"Whoa there! You look horrified!" he exclaimed, delight dancing in his tone as he helped steady you. His laughter was lighthearted, but all you could feel was a rising tide of anxiety as you quickly removed yourself from his grasp and followed him into the building.

You glanced back at the car, still feeling an irrational fear of the bomb that might still be lurking there, as Dazai led you into the lobby. The building was unnecessarily large, the sheer emptiness of the main floor was filled by the presence of a couple stern-faced guards who seemed to watch your every move. You doubted that anything important was present on the ground floor, but the overwhelming atmosphere made your skin crawl.

Without hesitation, Dazai strode into the elevator, and you noted how it required him to scan his ID to access whatever floor he intended to take you to. He flashed a quick glance at you, and for a brief moment, you wondered what thoughts were stirring in his head.

As the elevator ascended with a soft ding, you looked around, heart racing as you realized you had to figure out an escape plan. As fun as it was being next to your favorite character, you were painfully aware that these were not just characters in a book anymore; they were real, with real motivations and no obligation to like you. The knowledge that you held secrets of theirs—information that could easily cross the line into invasion of privacy made your stomach twist with unease.

The elevator doors opened with a soft chime and Dazai stepped out, prompting you to follow closely behind. He knocked on a large door, waiting patiently for permission to enter. You strained to hear the muffled voice from within, but it was too distant to decipher.

Just as you were starting to feel a sense of dread building inside you, Dazai gripped a hand that emerged from the door and twisted it. "Behave," he commanded, though you couldn't tell if it was a threat, a warning, or both— either way, it might as well have been the same thing from him.

The door swung open, and you were swept into the room alongside Dazai, your heart pounding in your chest as you took in the scene before you. There, across the polished table, were two familiar faces that would ensure you felt every ounce of your nervousness creep up your spine.

Mori's gaze shifted toward you, a smile spreading across his lips as he assessed you. "I'm assuming you are the one found in the snow?" he inquired, and you nodded, feeling a strange mix of fear and disbelief as you shuffled back slightly, instinctively shielding yourself behind Dazai.

"Woke up with claims that they were from another world where we are characters from a book. I would've shot them the moment they spoke that nonsense—especially since they're a very unreliable narrator," Dazai interjected, his tone light yet laced with an edge of seriousness. You stood there, mouth agape, eyes wide as you processed his words, a chill running down your spine at the thought that he might truly have pulled the trigger.

Mori nodded, humming thoughtfully as he motioned for Dazai to continue, which he did. "But... I found pretty reliable stuff to back their claims up," he added, and in the blink of an eye, your phone, school ID, and keys were tossed onto the table in front of you.

You reached for them instinctively, but Dazai was faster, sliding them just out of your reach. Mori took a closer look at your ID and seemingly dead phone, a coy smile creeping onto his face as he bent the card to examine it, making you panic again.

He looked up at you, that unsettling smile still in place. "We have much to talk about, Y/n L/n."

"Sure, sure—can you stop bending that? If I end up going home, my parents will kill me if that thing breaks!" you blurted, your nerves getting the better of you. Mori chuckled, placing the card back down and sliding it toward you, but once again, just as you made a move to grab it, Dazai snatched it away effortlessly and shoved it into his pocket, leaving you feeling utterly helpless.

Your mind raced as you processed what was happening, the gravity of your situation weighing down on you. You were trapped in a world where danger lurked around every corner, and the people who you used to fangirl for are more than willing to kill you.

You claim that you are from another world so can you expand on that?" Mori questions you as he leans back on the chair, his fingers placed beneath his chin as though in thought.

"Well, uhh... the world I'm in, you guys don't exist—well, you do, but you're fictional. I don't know how I ended up in that snow dump, but I did, and I don't know why either..." you twiddle your thumbs, your heart racing as you try to find the right words to convey the bizarre reality of your situation.

"Do you know... what part of the book you are in?" Mori asks you, his voice steady, while Dazai turns towards you with an intrigued expression, his eyes glinting with mischief.

Your eyes wander in thought, reflecting the chaos within. "Well, I'm not sure of the exact part, but... do you know where Paul Valerine is?" You ask, hoping that mentioning the minor character will provide some clarity.

Mori hums, nodding slowly, "He... Paul Valerine is someone I'm familiar with. Do you want me to send someone to see where his location is?—"

"No, no, no! So he's still... somewhere. That's enough to know what timeline I'm in." You freak out, shaking your head vigorously at the thought of barging into the complicated plot line so soon, the idea of disturbing the narrative sending a chill down your spine.

"Ah... does Paul Valerine have a major part to play in this?" Mori questions, his curiosity piqued as he leans forward, the light catching the sharp angles of his face.

You scoff, laughing lightly, "Oh, no, not at all. You'd have to have zero social life and use your last sanity to know characters that aren't in the main series..." Your laughter fades, leaving an uncomfortable silence that envelops the room, making the others stare at you with a mix of concern and bewilderment.

"Well—my point is, yeah, I know what era I'm in but not when exactly... that will take a while," you explain, your voice steadying as you push through the anxiety bubbling within.

Mori thinks for a moment, tapping his fingers against the armrest of his chair. "Well, at least you know what's to come... and that will be useful." The way he says it gives the implication of being involved with the mafia sends a wave of unease coming over you.

"Sooo, what now? Do I just spout information of the future?" you ask awkwardly, trying to mask your apprehension with a lighthearted tone.

"Oh, well, I thought you'd be tired and need to rest. But if not, I would gladly—"

"Nope! Not at all! I will cry if I am awake a minute longer." You laugh phonily, the sound echoing hollowly in the room before you clear your throat, trying to regain composure. "But uh... where do I, you know... rest for the night?"

"Oh, the couch over there. You are useful from context, but I need to know if you are worth keeping..." Mori smiles, pointing at the red velvet chaise across the room, its plush fabric luminous under the dim light. You turn your gaze to the couch, feeling reluctant at the idea of resting in the office of the port mafia's boss.

"Oh!... How fun!..."

— next chapter…

[consilium-games]

A New Offering

It has been entirely too long since my last post, and likewise, since my last title, so let me rectify that right . . . now!

In The Queen Smiles, I played with a new mechanical embellishment, on top of my usual Ghost/Echo-inspired framework. The 'One Red' system gave me a surprising amount of interesting design space to play around in, and as I said in the previous post, I found enough to make a fair supplement!

That supplement is here: One Red explores a wide range of different mechanical conceits and additions and minigames and subsystems, all intended to make even the most routine roll of two six-sided dice into as much of a workhorse as your group could want. You can put mechanics onto "unnatural mental effects on your main character", or "terrifying (or beneficent) being sharing your character's body", or even "procedurally generate the world or play an NPC no one should directly control". You can even play around with time itself, telling a story out of order, and zooming in or flashing back (or forward) to the causal connections between the key moments of a story. Whether you use this for Rashomon-style conflicting events, or creation-myth exploration of a people's defining tale, or even use it as a meta-narrative device, in which some mysterious sequence of events requires investigation, you can do things few other games can survive trying.

That's Great, But Why?

Mostly, I like exploring design-space in RPGs. While no one could ever hope to exhaustively do this, it has always fascinated me just how much you can get even a simple system to do, especially when that system really does the intended work. By that, I mean that while a game like Dread really does lend itself to feelings of dread . . . it doesn't lend itself to anything else in particular. It's not a system, it's a mechanic--like "roll two or more dice, one determines success or failure, all others determine complications or costs". And systems allow all the cool interesting exploration.

In particular, I had fun seeing just how detailed, or how abstract, one could be in figuring out the Queen's values, priorities, sensibilities, and attitude. One minute, She Smiles on you putting one of her emissaries in your rear-view and flooring it, and narrowly escaping. The next, She Smiles your getting pulled over and taken to jail. Why send that emissary after you if She likes that you escaped? If She likes that you escaped, why should She approve of you going to jail? These contradictions require some kind of resolution, whether it comes from the Queen having elliptical, corkscrew logic, or some simple, clear, but unexpected priority. Perhaps the Queen sends emissaries to provoke you to drastic action, and whether you succeed or fail, She wants you to become a champion, hardening through hardship. Or, maybe you carry some kind of contagion, and She never intended her emissary to kill you, because then you can't spread the lilting melody from Arcadia--but you can certainly spread it in a jailhouse.

But as I quickly saw, I'd created a mechanic and then built a system around it. So I began to ask, what else could I do with this mechanic now that I had it, and what other systems could I make with it? And that was before realizing, I'd actually made two mechanics, and only used one in The Queen Smiles. Clearly, I had to remedy this.

The first mechanic in the 'One Red' elaboration is the one that The Queen Smiles actually uses: adding a special significance to one of the dice in the roll, without changing its mechanical meaning. The rules don't care what you tack onto the Goal or Danger holding the Red Die, only that you tack on something. And given that in all of my Succession-derived games, the dice you roll have a hard and tangible link to the narrative, this means that the One Red die projects a narrative meaning on top of an existing narrative meaning.

But the other mechanic I realized I'd made, as ideas started to congeal and extrude, is adding a special value to one of the dice, layering a mechanic on top of a mechanic. This shows up more One Red, perhaps more than the former. In this approach, the story or narrative may not directly notice or care which facet of a roll you assign your Red die to. But the rules themselves, the ones that say when to roll, and how to interpret the dice, directly care about the added layer of value on one of your dice.

The former gives us things like "portraying a character that no one should directly control", whether that be an incomprehensible being from beyond, or a collective entity that players would have incentive to bias, or even a character that should seem unpredictable and unstable, at all times. You're using the same machinery for creating stories, but you've done something a bit complicated in tying the story back to the machinery.

The latter gives us things like prompts to cut forward or backward in time, defining parts or features of the world around you as you move through it, even nominally very mechanics-heavy things like a form of wild magic you only barely control at all--but that you still do, yourself. The same machinery, but tied to itself in a complicated feedback loop.

So What to Use This For?

As far as One Red goes, most of its verbiage relates it to Succession, rather than The Queen Smiles, for a few reasons I want to get into here.

First, amazing as the scope of Cool New Mechanics might be with One Red, the nature of One Red makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to sensibly use the Red die for more than one thing. The Queen Smiles, as a game, really can't also use most of the ideas in One Red--while one or two could work, it invites confusion and doesn't directly aid the game's core intent.

Second, since publishing Succession, I've had a few readers describe the book as anything from "hard to read" up to "impossible to understand". I also have had readers describe it as a really great game, and say that its unique style and approach adds a lot to what kind of game it plays, and what way to tell its stories. I knew during writing that I wanted to try for the latter, and if I got it then it would come at the expense of the former.

But, I've also gotten better at writing rulebooks for public consumption--funny how repeatedly doing something can make you better at it, right? And while I still consider Succession a fine game, maybe better than anything I've made since, that 'expense' above is steep. Steeper than I want to pay again. So Chamber+Circle has its blunter, more direct, rule-focused style, and The Queen Smiles prattles on for a decadent twenty pages when its source material is literally "take Horror and Fairytales from Book of Sand, and rub in a novel mechanic".

So in making this latest supplement, by addressing the rules directly to Succession as a starting frame of reference, I hope to make Succession, retroactively, a bit better and more valuable. The book still has the same cryptic, sphinxian delivery as ever, because the book hasn't changed. But, someone getting Succession, or who already got it, has one more supplement that immediately speaks to making this cryptically-written game into something even more unique, and without any obfuscatory delivery. That's definitely not to say that One Red can't enhance Chamber+Circle, or indeed any Succession-related Ghost/Echo-inspired game. Just put a Red die among the ones you were already rolling, and see what you can do with that distinction within rules! But artistically, I wanted to tip the scales more for Succession, as the darling I made that has the most objections.

And as for future offerings, I have a book very much in mind. I haven't seen a lot of RPGs that deal at all with romance. It's almost a taboo topic, judging by the reception of Monsterhearts (now with a second edition!) And while Monsterhearts is a fine game for what it wants to do, it has some rough patches, and even if you sand those off, it wants to do some very specific things. If you don't, Monsterhearts has a lot for you to navigate around. So my next title will present my take on heartwarming, sincere, passionate romance stories, focusing on madness, tragedy, and personal loss. It's gonna be a fun one and I look forward to publishing it this year!

[whiningaboutyuri]

Beware the Guise of Logic: Valentia’s Celica

One thing I’ve come to learn as I get older is that brilliant arguments can be made for ignorant points. For the better part of two months and two playthroughs, I’ve been desperately trying to suss out my feelings of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia. I could barely stomach to play it, but for reasons that have eluded me for a very long time. I’ve already engaged in debate in regards to the game’s take on gender being fraught with destructive stereotypes and a largely inferior story even to its bare-bones original. And I think the most shocking thing is that most people agree that, at the very least to some extent, the game does have conspicuous sexist elements in its execution, but still defend parts or whole of the game as either not “inherently” sexist, or having enough merits to be excused by its own logic. Even more upsettingly, there are accusations that sussing out these elements are somehow the more backwards and destructive attitude to have.

So I have taken it upon myself to make an actual, honest-to-goodness, two-part essay making a case that this game is built on a narrative with intention of enforcing an outdated, gender-essentialist view of sexism--which by no means makes a more liberal interpretation incorrect, merely working against the game’s original authorial intent. To a lesser extent, this is also an attempt to contextualize a disparate narrative and demonstrate that its logic is so entrenched in a real-world sexism that it simply cannot survive on its own without it. Which is a big fancy way of saying “a two-part essay to better explain the points I yelled at in a previous article, and to offer some counter argument to a lot of defenses of the narrative”.

Today’s essay is going to observe how Celica’s route suffers for the game’s sexist internal narrative. No, I am not writing a big slander against Celica’s character or deeming it ‘inferior’ to her previous counterpart. But there is a lot to be said about the handling of both.

Before we get started, let’s get some term definitions out of the way, to prevent us from going at each other’s throat. When I say sexism, I mean the stereotyping and/or presumption of inherent characteristics, often negative, based solely on someone’s sex and/or gender identity; especially the implicit ideal that on a binary of masculine and feminine, the latter is superior to the former. Long story short, “the shit we do between two same people because one is a boy and one is a girl”. Also important to note that, while it is very true that men are harmed by sexism, sexism works on a principle of the feminine inferiority to the masculine, and thus women tend to be disproportionately negatively affected by its thinking. Fair? Good. Let’s move on.

Another thing to understand is principles and presence of a sexist narrative DOES NOT equate to an inherent diminished value of any kind to female or feminine participants within it. Obviously, there’s a damn high comorbidity to grossly sexist writing and poorly executed female characters, but the latter is often a symptom, not the part of the disease. Does a bad or poorly executed female character a sexist narrative make? Not necessarily, but it can serve as a strong indicator since, as previously stated, women are disproportionately affected by sexist writing.

So now we’ve got that all out of the way, LET’S GET ARGUING!

POINT A: SHADOWS OF VALENTIA WAS BUILT WITH A GENDER BINARY IN MIND

One would be hard pressed to have a game that opens on such a stronger note of opposites that are doomed to conflict. We lay our scene on the continent of Valentia, divided in half on its border between the peaceful and non-aggressive Zofia, and the barren and war-torn Rigel. These two nations are ruled by two different dragon deities, with Zofia ruled by the kind and gentle Mila, and Rigel ruled by the cruel and disciplined Duma. Take a guess if they are represented by two different genders and which one is which.

It cannot easily be overstated that sex conflict is a critical element to this game’s thematic. In a Degenki interview with the game’s director, Toshiyuki Kusakihara, Kusakihara says thus about his interpretation of Fire Emblem Gaiden, the original game to be remade by his team:

“Gaiden’s central theme was always about a confrontation between the opposites, such as “strength/love” and “men/women.” Alm pursues a path to power, Celica stands on the side of love.”

Co-director Kenshi Nakashi goes on further to say:

Duma and Mila are the very representations of power and love. This battle isn’t really portrayed in the original Gaiden’s story, though...We wanted to make this story known to all players of the game, so many scenes were added for this purpose.

Before we know the in-game conflict in the timeline, the two nations waste no time being binarized and essentialized, with gender being no small thematic consequence. Despite being divine beings, Duma and Mila are given clear gender, and they are symbolized by a presumed, inherent quality of said gender expression. The symbol of manhood is strength, power, and military dominance, with its citizens warlike and devoid of compassion. The country symbolized by womanhood is peaceful, spiritual, without conflict, and thus rendering its residence childlike and self-indulgent.

And one more time for those in the back, this essentialization is not subtle. You play two stories, with each country’s represented by one who identifies with their corresponding deity's gender. The offical art has Alm holding a sword and looking forward, with Celica’s eyes closed and silently praying. The tagline at the back of the box says “THE WAY OF THE SWORD OR THE WAY OF THE HEART”.

Gender, or more specifically, a binary, essentialist view of gender takes center stage of this narrative. Femininity is not strength, and masculinity is not compassion. And, notably, these two concepts are immediately set in conflict with each other. These two caricatures of nations are pitched at the opposite ends of a steep divide, symbolized in game as a divine accord that cannot be crossed for the existential safety of the respective nations. Crossing it, indeed, was the beginning of all the woes that were to befall this game.

In a real world context, this is a logic that simply cannot exist. Putting aside that the inherent differences between men and women are notoriously debatable and have cross-culturally and cross-temporarily have been demonstrated as variable, the human experience is not so easily divided in such lofty concepts of “power” and “love”. But is a logic that we must adopt, despite our real world context and sensibilities, in order to accept the story. A suspension of disbelief is no strange, perhaps even a necessity, for the immersion into a work, but it is very telling, and very troubling, that this is the one that we must accept first and foremost.

POINT B: AS CONSEQUENCE OF THIS BINARY, CELICA’S STORY IS DOMINATED BY A NARROW VIEW OF HER WOMANHOOD

The female protagonist of the story, and the implicit representative of womanhood, is Celica, a kind young priestess living in a priory. Despite being an inheritor of the throne, she chooses a life rejecting the privilege of her heritage to better help her people. She is, unquestionably, a deeply maternal figure to be respected, admired, and loved. And within the priory, for very good reason, she absolutely is. However, when her homeland is in danger of a drought caused by a sudden disappearance of its patron goddess, Mila, she chooses to venture out and discover the truth of why Mila has disappeared, and to restore her blessings to the nation.

It’s a noble cause, and should, by all accounts, have made for a story of a bright young woman’s attempt to save her country by her own agency and own choices. And a story that rejects the essentialism of leadership, and finds empowerment in kindness, altruism, and peace is by no stretch a fantasy considering her character establishment. But the story is ‘the way of the sword versus the way of the heart’. Celica may care, but not in action. She may love, but it must be of a passive, impotent love that shatters in the logic of her world.

The first and foremost snarl is the fate of Celica’s motivation, which is to find Mila and restore her blessings. In the original Gaiden, the goddess Mila never appeared in story; she was sealed away in a magic, and remains such without any time to be shown on screen. In Echoes, it’s taken a step further in showing Mila being removed from the story by main antagonist of Alm’s story, King Rudolf. While the female god’s own lack of agency and easily incapacitation by a male antagonist, especially upon a later reveal that she was planning her own death and depowerment for the better of society, does leave a lot of iffy subtext, it’s still a reasonable plot twist, and leaves the locking into the final, actual conflict--that Celica needs to confront Duma to save Mila and restore her country. Or at least, that’s what it should be.

But from that point forward, Celica’s determination begins to notably wane. After the twist, she is tormented by Jedah, a disciple of Duma who convinces her that the only way to stop Duma’s assault is to sacrifice her soul to the dark god in order to ease his descent into madness. Celica is frequently confronted with how pointlessly foolish a plan this would be, both by herself and (to be discussed later) the increasing skepticism of her notably male companions.

One very interesting thing of note is the development of Celica’s lock-in motivation--not to contront Mila, but to assist the male counter protagonist, Alm. Celica and Alm did meet briefly and catastrophically before Celica discovered the disappearance of Mila. Upon seeing Alm’s decision to march on in a military campaign after liberating the accosted capital of Zofia, she inferred that his intent was to further break divine accord and invade Rigel, possibly in conquest to become emperor himself (to be fair--she is 100% right). So it’s very interesting that, when she is approached to sacrifice herself to Duma, the following (emphasis mine) is what begins to give her second thoughts.

Jedah: Her soul, as Duma’s, is host to the madness shared by all dragonkind. Duma will grow stronger till that power brings his ruin—and Rigel’s alongside it. It is no different from how Zofia now rots in Mila’s absence.

Celica: Her absence by your hand! And what is this madness you speak of? Do you truly claim that Mila and Duma are fated to destroy themselves?

Jedah: I do. Which is exactly why your soul is required. It is rare and precious—born of Zofian royal blood and marked by the Brand. Such a soul could set Duma’s path to rights and ensure his survival. And with Mila restored to her place, both our peoples might be saved. As for the boy, Alm—if you do this, he could lay down his arms.

Celica: *gasp*

Until this point, Celica’s motivation was unquestionably that of her country and her people. But this marks the first, but far the only, indication that her ‘true’ motivation is Alm; and more specifically, her relationship with Alm.   

In fact, it becomes painfully clear that, even by her own admission, Celica’s motivation is transformed from “power”, the desire to protect and liberate her country, to “love”--her feelings for Alm. Is this troubling? Not necessarily; being motivated by loved ones is far from gender exclusive. But there is something troubling and damning by the direction Celica’s motivation goes. Compare her opening speech at the beginning of the game, where she begs the master of the priory to give his blessings for a mission to save her country…

Nomah: You’re certain I can’t dissuade you from going, little one?

Celica: I must, Nomah. It’s been years since crops last grew on Zofian soil. Our barren fields have fallen victim to Terrors, the Rigelians have invaded… I fear some ill must have befallen the Earth Mother, Mila. I can’t help but feel this is all related. I know it.

Nomah: Hmm… Perhaps it is, at that. I’ll not deny that the kingdom of Zofia faces her darkest hour in some time. More sick and hungry come to the priory’s door each day seeking aid…

Celica: The key to everything lies with Mila. I shall travel to her temple and learn what’s become of her.

Nomah: Yes, but little one… You know well the reason Mycen placed you in my care. With the king’s passing, you are the last living member of the Zofian royal line. There are many who would seek to use you. Or even end you. That threat is greater now than ever. Yet you would still leave, knowing that?

Celica: I must. Even if my decision betrays the care you and Mycen have shown me. You’ve done so much to keep me safe, and it breaks my heart to pain you. But what calls me to do this goes beyond my heart. I can only ask your forgiveness, Nomah.

To her conversation with Alm in the final act, before she agrees to the sacrifice.

Celica: You don’t understand, Alm. I came here knowing what awaited me.

Alm: What?

Celica: Back on the island, I had a dream. A dream where something terrible happened to you. So I decided to petition Mila for the strength to protect you. Yet for all my travels, you’ve still faced terrible danger. And you were even forced to end your own father’s life. …I’d seen it all. I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t change a thing. I failed to keep you safe, Alm!

Alm: That’s not… Celica, none of what’s happened is your fault. You’re not to blame for any of it!

Celica: But I won’t lose you… I won’t let any of you die! I don’t want you to fight Duma. I don’t want anyone to be hurt or killed. That’s my only desire in this life.

Alm: Celica!

Celica: And this is the only means I have of ensuring that comes to pass. So again, Alm—I’m sorry. I wish it could have been different. I always have. I wish I could have gone home to the village and lived there with you.

There was no reason that Celica’s motivation could not have been both her country and Alm. But by the game’s logic of power/love and man/woman, such would have been disruptive. Alm’s path, inevitably, drove him to violence in power, and Celica’s to self-sacrifice. By an external logic, this is absurd; Celica was already willing to defy authority to save Mila. She is a competent fighter, and rallied a group of soldiers to her cause. She cared about her army, and inspired them. But when push came to shove she could only engage proactively for so long. Her modus operandi goes from defying authority and venturing out to the world, to abandoning her army and her country in blind self-sacrifice. But to the game’s logic, one based on a sexist presumption that men and women are opposites, never to be crossed, and never to be reconciled, this is not idiosyncratic or a glaring farce, but a perfectly logical outcome.

It’s hard to parse where this change came from in Celica’s attitute. It is laced almost deviously into a few tells for the audience to pick up on. Celica goes from leading the charge without fear to apologizing for every action she’s taking. Her ‘flaw’ of keeping her emotions to herself develops when plot convenient and is used as a rough justification for her own leaps of motivation.

And her story is only further complicated by its execution...

POINT C: CELICA DOES NOT COMPLETE HER CHARACTER ARC WITHOUT THE AID OF OTHER MEN, ESPECIALLY ALM

It’s been argued that, despite being a roundabout path, Celica ultimately completes her mission of rescuing Alm and saving her country. I fundamentally disagree, because while it’s true that Alm is saved and Celica’s country is saved, it is by far and away not by her own hand.

If we consider her motivation is to save her country, while it is accomplished, it is not accomplished by her volition. She made great strides, and did many heroic things that benefited the country, but in the end, she never saved Mila nor did she liberate her country. By the final act, she has been manipulated by Jedah, her army has been condemned to die at the hands of terrors, and her hard work is rendered yet another crisis for Alm and his army to resolve.

Neither did Celica save Alm. Indeed, while she was willing to sacrifice her life and her dream to save Alm from being killed, she agreed to the manipulations of one who she knew from the start was untrustworthy, and thus could not save Alm without Alm’s participation of saving her first. Indeed, the last time Celica is an agency of her own in the story, it’s screaming for Alm to kill her because of how badly she failed in trying to save him.

And this cannot be overstated: this scene was not in the original game. Yes, Celica was trapped in Duma tower, but when you met her, she had her army in full swing, and was fighting for herself until Alm came to rescue her. When Celica meets Alm in Echoes, she’s kept apart in a cage, willing marching off to do something that she and Alm and her own army and the audience knows is completely and utterly foolish, while Jedah is treating her defection as another failure of Alm’s for not being able to save her. By the end of the game, not even Celica’s mistakes are her own.

Another thing that cannot be overstated is that this is not limited by endgame. Another completely added addition to the game is Celica’s brother, Conrad, who travels incognito and rushes in to save her for frequently contrived reasons. And yes, he does slap her when he learns that she’s planning to sacrifice herself to Duma (again why could he not just talk to her like a reasonable goddamn human being?).

Beyond that, there’s the inflated weight of Saber, the adult male traveling companion of Celica’s groups. He was literally nothing but a background drunk in the original game. In Echoes, he becomes Celica’s right hand and “mature” foil to her idealistic and sheltered ways. And sure, he may be loyal to her, but he’s far from respectful--calling her ‘lass’ instead of her name (hey, and it’s not like women have to deal with that stuff in the workplace, right?) and generally insistently inserting his own opinion into her decisions. It’s even worth noting that the game explicitly blocks Celica from going out to sea unless she hires him, despite the fact that she a warrior priestess who can uses swords and magic. Compare this to Alm, who has to go against his father figure in order to start his story (and continuously defies a characters acting as consul).

There’s a lot of internal justification to why Celica can be talked down by these other characters. A lot of it comes down to the game’s attitude of her being sheltered, or citing the every-justifying flaw of ‘hiding her emotions’. But there is more than a few notes of gendered hypocrisy, even in the text. When Conrad obfuscates a grand design in what he thinks is best for his country's interests, it’s portrayed as heroic. When Celica does it, it’s portrayed as selfish. When Saber can be flippant and weary, it’s justified because he’s a seasoned mercenary with world experience. When Celica is short, people immediately question it, like her fight with Alm, or when she gets upset at Conrad for slapping her.

But I think the most telling thing is not just that Celica’s right hands, sound boards, and foils are all men, but which men they are. Celica has a team of people who love her and respect her at the priory. Mae, Boey, and Genny all joined her because the loved and trusted her, and believed in what she can do. But the game conspicuously doesn’t let them be Celica’s confidants, and even shoes them out at plot critical moments to give room for these respectable male outsiders to save their peace and, more than once, save her instead of her own team.

POINT D: CELICA’S NARRATIVE IS NOT RECONCILED WITH ALM’S--IT’S ABSORBED BY HIM

At the end of the story, Celica’s birthright means nothing. Her desire to save her country means nothing. Her army has been absorbed into Alm’s, and she herself is married to him. She is not a queen because she was born of Zofian royalty, or because she rallied an army. She is not a queen because she gave her all to save her people. Because as the very story developed, her dream was to be accosted, and her story in arrested development. In the end, she is queen because she is Alm’s bride.

But Alm got to see the Valentia he wanted to create. He got to see a world without gods, and got to continue an empire of his own two hands. Alm accomplished everything he set out to do, and far more. But despite the divine accord of opposites being broken, it feels like nothing is different. In essence, the answer to the riddle of man and woman is the implication that there was no need for the woman to exist.

In the original game, Celica was an agent in the final battle. She was tricked by Duma, but in the final fight, she was allowed to hold back an army by her own hands to buy Alm the time he needed to find the key to Duma’s defeat. She made a mistake, but she was allowed, by her own hands, to redeem herself and take action to protect and aid the course of history. So for all it’s sexist origins, even in the original game, Celica was allowed to have something in the end. For the story to work, she was needed, or else Alm would have been trapped and unable to accomplish his mission.

Celica’s route could not exist without Alm. She would have lost what the game would deem her development and her motivation. Alm’s story could and did exist without Celica. Alm would have still followed his path that would inevitably lead him to Duma with no consequence. He would have been the hero who was the chosen one, who stopped the bad guys, who toppled the evil empire, who slew the god, and who saved the world. The only thing he’d be missing is a bride.

Very rarely will you run into a story with a strict-text statement along the lines of “women are less than men”. But like so many social ills, sexism has a language all it’s own, one that gets none-too-lost in translation. The game isn’t saying that women can’t be leaders, but the remake made sure Celica’s attempt to be one resulted in her death. The game isn’t saying women need to be saved, but Celica’s choices always seem to land her into trouble that she can’t get herself out of. The game isn’t saying that women can’t fight, or women can’t make good decisions, or that women are weaker, but it makes sure there’s a steady stream of plot contrivance for Celica to trip on, as well as a team of competent men to catch her fall. It’s not saying that a woman’s place is to be a wife, it just happens to be Celica’s happy ending. And it’s not saying that women are inferior, it just made a game where men are pitted against women, and let only one of our two protagonists hold the sword to save the world. And by the game’s logic, that makes perfect sense.

Anyway, this is only step one in sitting down and getting mad at a game none of my readers have played. As I said, men too are hurt from sexism too. For instance, it gives them stories that are laughably stupid and teeth achingly boring.

See yuns next time.

[almost-a-whig]

Magic: Science We Don’t Understand Yet

My class visited the Harvard Medical School museum yesterday. The curators seemed to know everything concerning medical history, rattling off details about anything from the mental status of President Garfield’s assassin to inaccuracies in fetal skeletal reconstruction. In passing, one of the curators mentioned that the museum owned a repository of information on witchcraft. I was intrigued, but witchcraft was never mentioned again. So I looked into it myself.

Upon first consideration, it might seem ridiculous to include magic in a collection of medical history. Broomsticks and cauldrons and other iconography strongly linked to our social perception of witchcraft seem to have nothing in common with the surgeries and vaccinations of modern medical practice. But historically speaking, magic and medicine have been so strongly linked as to be almost indistinguishable in records from the past, and the link goes as far back as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written in AD 77.

According to the Britannica article on the subject, the Natural History is notable for its attention to detail and proper sources, as well as for its novel assemblage of seemingly unrelated facts into a cohesive narrative. It was one of the few surviving texts detailing the lifestyles and practices of Ancient Romans, and as the sources Pliny used were lost to time, his work became the de facto textbook for a classical education. Thus, because Pliny spoke about magic in relation to scientific and medical innovation in his work, giving both the same weight, the two were conflated. Pliny’s work was largely unchallenged for centuries, and it was only in the late 1500’s that leading scientists began to truly reject Pliny’s teachings. By then, the link between magic and medicine was thoroughly embedded in western culture.

Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, published in 1923, gives a rich account of Pliny’s attitudes towards magic and science. Pliny’s works are filled with references to magic, and he attributes magical tendencies to major historical figures ranging from Plato to Moses to Pythagoras. However, because “nearly half the books of the Natural History deal in whole or in part with remedies for diseases,” magic is linked most strongly to medicine. Pliny states that “no one doubts” that magic “originally sprang from medicine.” He believed that magic and medicine developed together, with magic as a subversive, false counterpart with only echoes of truth. Pliny expresses bitterness that false magic casts doubt into the minds of patients as to the validity of any medicine at all. Although Pliny’s distaste for magic was rooted in his disbelief in its validity, he certainly seemed to unselfconsciously believe in very similar things. For example, he cites herbal treatments which require that the plant be picked with the left hand or without looking backward, and he seems to believe in the abilities of herbal concoctions to grant grace, glory, favor, and luck. His belief only stops with the truly nonsensical, like herbs with the ability to dry up rivers or open locked doors. When considering Pliny’s confused attitudes about magic and superstition, society’s love-hate relationship with magic and suspicion of scientists and medical professionals as magic practitioners are unsurprising.

Jumping forward to the 15th century, double-edged reliance on and mistrust of medicine in Europe is still alive and well, and nowhere is this clearer than in society’s treatment of midwifery. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII wrote an edict explicitly condemning witchcraft and approving the “just correction, imprisonment, and punishment” of witches, kicking off centuries of Inquisition-style witch trials. One of the most commonly targeted demographics in these trials were midwives. In these days, witches were commonly thought to use the corpses of babies in their magic, so naturally, midwives were suspect, because they provided contraceptive and abortive treatments as well as delivering still-born infants. Midwives were further targeted because they were often capable of providing women in labor with pain relief, a seemingly magical marvel. And it may not have been mere unsubstantiated suspicion: a paper written by Thomas Forbes in 1962 suggests that 15th century midwives often turned to occult activity out of desperation due to their low socioeconomic status (though this same paper seems to believe that witchcraft is a real phenomenon, so this must be taken with a grain of salt.)

Magic was deeply associated with the medical practices of non-European cultures as well. We can see this clearly in the trope of the “witch doctor”, a figure associated with African cultures and indigenous tribes of the Americas. Britannica defines witch doctor as “a healer or benevolent worker of magic in a nonliterate society” and classifies the term as a pejorative, and indeed, the term seems meant to imply the sort of suspicion and doubt that the western world has always applied to witchcraft. The dichotomy between the image of a revered, educated medical professional and a superstitious, illiterate magical healer highlights the way that connotations of magic are used by western academia to emphasize the otherness and unreliability of practices that don’t fit into the established medical power structure.

Records of unexplained events where the word “magic” is never used are telling as well—often, seemingly magical practices were reframed as religion. A 1953 article by Humphrey Humphreys explains it well: in the early days of medicine, disease was thought to be caused by the devil, so medical practitioners were primarily concerned with purging demons from the body. Priests and other religious figures were commonly called upon to heal the sick by excising evil spirits. Though we’re unaccustomed to considering the spiritual acts of religious leaders to be magical, the chanting, ritual, and symbolism of an exorcism certainly resembles our perception of witchcraft. Religion and religious healing are, in many ways, simply a benign form of magic. (And perhaps it is worth thinking twice about why unaccountable phenomena coming from white men with social capital are called religion, while the same phenomena coming from women and purportedly “uncivilized” cultures are called witchcraft.)

The traditional ties between magic and medicine continue to this day. In certain parts of the world, healing magic is still a common component of medical intervention, with as high a success rate as modern western doctors. Scientists seek to explain seemingly-impossible cures with catch-all terms like placebo. According to the World Health Organization, “alternative medicine”, including acupuncture, herbal cures, and hypnosis, has a global market of $60 billion US dollars, and 25% of modern medications come from plants originally used traditionally. Unresearched, faith-based, and ritualistic forms of medicine are still around and as influential as ever.

This all begs the question: what is the role of magic-like health care in modern medicine? The knee-jerk reaction of a modern scientist would be to reject magic altogether. Everyone knows that magic isn’t real, after all. But non-western and non-masculine medical professionals, modern pharmacology studies, and centuries of accumulated cultural knowledge say otherwise. While it may be true that there are no mystical, inexplicable forces that allow us to manipulate nature at a whim, it is hard to deny that there are facets of science and medicine that we don’t yet realize, and the line between unexplained and impossible is often blurred. Perhaps it is time to stop automatically discrediting the collective wisdom of centuries of medical practitioners, reframe so-called “alternative” medicine as science we don’t understand, and start taking it as seriously as our forebears did.

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[spicynbachili1]

How a book binds the Return of the Obra Dinn

That is The Mechanic, the place Alex Wiltshire invitations builders to debate the tough journeys they’ve taken to make their video games. This time, Return of the Obra Dinn [official site].

In direction of the tip of Return of the Obra Dinn’s four-and-a-half years in improvement, Lucas Pope had a buddy come over to playtest it. He sat him down, defined the way it’s a firstperson thriller sport wherein you uncover the destiny of the Obra Dinn, a service provider ship misplaced on its voyage into the Orient. Then he gave him the controls. “He performed for a bit and his response was, ‘This sport is in regards to the guide’.”

The guide includes a ledger of the Obra Dinn’s unlucky crew and illustrations of it in happier instances, a map of the ship, and chapters that define every loss of life alongside its unusual voyage, and it’s the place you plan your theories on the identify of every character and the way they died. As such, it serves as your key interface to the sport, or as Pope places it to me, “On the floor you suppose it’s an exploration sport, however you then realise that what you’re actually doing is utilizing the guide to determine shit out.”

But it surely began out as a manifest, a easy checklist of names. You’ll be able to truly nonetheless play Obra Dinn because it was in a demo which Pope launched for GDC 2016. It options 5 characters’ deaths to resolve, and enjoying it at the moment, it’d appear to be fairly shut in design to the ultimate factor. However that’s an phantasm.

“That is the factor with Obra Dinn. I didn’t see how it could play out,” says Pope. “I had no concept about something past the primary 15 minutes, which was the primary demo.” However the manifest’s checklist of six characters appeared to work simply nice. He favored the best way the names have been laid out, echoing the best way the actual East India Firm handled its crews as lists of names. “I wished within the sport to point out a few of that, the place you actually solely take into consideration them as names at first, however you get to know them and also you realise that they’re greater than names, they’re folks.”

Pope felt assured that the sport was coming collectively properly, so he wrote the storyline, a twisting story which encompasses the reason of 50 deaths inside a set of extraordinarily inflexible restrictions. For instance, Pope might solely inform the story on the fragmented factors of every crewmate’s loss of life. That’s since you, the participant, get to witness that second as a 3D tableau, frozen in time. And since these scenes are accessed by you utilizing a magical pocket watch on a corpse, Pope additionally needed to work out the logistics of presenting a path of deaths for the participant to comply with. “Simply figuring that out was actually the most important problem of the sport.”

However he succeeded, laying the plan out in a spreadsheet-like software he made to cross-reference crew names, deaths, places and instances. He then wrote scripts for the brief snippets of dialogue that play out earlier than every scene is revealed and drew the sketches of the crew and maps of the ship. Lastly, he put all of it collectively in a brand new demo and in November 2016 took it to PAX Australia.

It was a shock to see how the sport performed. In contrast to Pope, the PAX gamers didn’t already know the storyline backwards. He hadn’t appreciated how the unique demo’s 5 deaths, every offered in chronological order, have been adopted by a brand new part which options 13 new characters and a sequence of deaths which might be out of order. “This sport is linear and all narrative based mostly and all baked, and there was no level I might sit down and play it to get a really feel for what it’s truly like,” says Pope.

His PAX expertise confirmed him he’d gotten issues badly fallacious. “The core problem was that you just see the story out of order, there are 60 fucking folks, 4 decks, flashbacks which might be completely non-chronological.” When gamers got here throughout our bodies, they wouldn’t know when their deaths occurred. Clearly, the manifest wasn’t sufficient to assist organise the storm of data the sport was throwing round.

Earlier than the guide, Pope tried a timeline-based interface. “I had a tough time making it look good and never really feel cluttered, which is without doubt one of the many causes I moved on to the complete guide interface.”

So, the right way to give the occasions a construction? The reply got here within the type of headings. What if a scene was known as The Finish, Half Three? That will naturally sit after Half Two, and due to this fact in an outlined place within the total narrative. “As soon as I had that, it was fairly apparent this ought to be a guide, as a result of all of a sudden you possibly can flip by way of it like a timeline,” Pope says.

Pope doesn’t actually prefer to make video games that want specific tutorials. Papers, Please managed to precise its core mechanics by way of play itself, and whereas he knew Obra Dinn must maintain gamers’ arms much more, he grabbed at any intuitive characteristic he might. The guide supplied an ideal metaphor for a timeline, naturally affording the power to flip backwards and forwards by way of its pages and thus by way of the time of the story.

Nonetheless, it was a ache to lose the manifest. In thematic phrases, Pope favored the best way the impersonal checklist of names contrasted with the best way the sport would step by step reveal them as folks. As an illustration of how necessary that is to him, the rationale why dialogue transcripts characteristic a cross subsequent to traces spoken by the character who died within the scene, however don’t distinguish between spoken traces by different characters, is “as a result of I don’t like decreasing any individual to a letter”.

However on a sensible degree, he knew the guide would pull right into a world of labor he wished to keep away from. When improvement started on Obra Dinn, Pope had simply completed localising Papers, Please, which was “the type of factor that scars you for all times”. Papers, Please has tens of 50×100 pixel paperwork which he’d initially manually specified by English himself, pixel-by-pixel. Localising them into seven different languages, becoming the translations into the identical house, was gruelling. He promised himself Obra Dinn would have “essentially the most fundamental UI I might get away with, so the manifest was like that, very fundamental, nothing fancy, three pages.”

Certainly one of Pope’s first mockups for the guide. “The management system right here was weird: the sticks/mouse would scroll each map and sketch home windows round, clicking the motion button would edit the destiny, shoulder buttons to web page ahead and backward. It nonetheless retains the timeline indicator, which ended up being superfluous.”

The guide imposed a complete lot of latest UI. Its looser structure averted plenty of the technicalities he confronted localising Papers, Please, however entailed plenty of difficult programming. He additionally needed to design a approach to navigate the guide, beginning with a gamepad scheme as a result of he knew it’d be more durable to create. There are many little nuances, equivalent to separating the D-pad choice from web page turning to keep away from unintended web page turns. He added a bookmarking perform so that you simply can refer again to all of the scenes wherein a single character seems (“everybody is aware of what a bookmark is”). And he needed to keep away from the temptation so as to add shortcuts between chapters and bookmarks. There’s only one shortcut, which flicks to the desk of contents. “Anything would wish plenty of instruction, so it was the best factor. Then, when you resolve you gained’t have that many options, educating isn’t that arduous as a result of it’s only a guide. The participant will determine to show the web page.”

However he wished the guide to positively seem like a guide. “I used to be considering, might I print it out, and wouldn’t it look cool?” He added a characteristic that almost all gamers in all probability gained’t have seen, that the gutter, the central divide between dealing with pages, strikes from one aspect of the backbone to the opposite as you flip by way of its pages. “You’ve gotta suppose I wished it to seem like a guide if you wish to make it try this.”

And but Return of the Obra Dinn’s guide isn’t a guide. It’s virtually a HyperCard stack, and it’s the place you carry out the important thing actions within the sport, figuring out every character and the way they died. What’s extra, its chapters begin out clean, magically filling in with particulars once you witness every scene. The design of that sequence, of seeing a personality’s loss of life and its web page showing, was one other problem, and Pope solely solved it a month earlier than the sport got here out.

Till that time, the scene would seem for a minute, the guide would seem, after which the sport would ship gamers again to the current, giving no additional alternative to look at the scene for clues. Pope’s change was to permit gamers to wander round after the minute performs out and the guide fills in, however he is aware of it nonetheless leaves gamers ready for the guide to seem to allow them to begin including their options. “To repair that might have been much more work,” he concedes. “I felt, OK the sport’s not good however I felt that after 4 and a half years, I might ship it. You may get somewhat ship-happy, principally.” And apart from, that minute of compelled time with the scene slows you down, helps you discover the main points you’ll want to resolve the sport’s mysteries.

Return of the Obra Dinn is full of little inconveniences like this. In spite of everything, it might simply have a button that exits a scene. “I actually didn’t need that, that’s sport considering, an exterior thought course of,” Pope says. And you’ll’t replay scenes with out schlepping to search out the physique to make use of the watch on it, even when it’d be easy addition to the guide’s set of features.

”That’s one of many dangers, gambles, I took that I take so much in my video games, the place I inconvenience the participant as a way to maintain the temper, the sense of the principles I’ve arrange,” Pope says. And in Obra Dinn he certain himself up in guidelines. “This sport was a juggling of restrictions: 1bit, story solely advised when somebody dies, simply layer upon layer of issues that I couldn’t do.”

There are two guidelines to the watch. First, it helps you to go into the previous, however you’ll be able to’t change something, all you are able to do is look. And second, it gained’t teleport you within the present time. So you’ll be able to’t go right into a scene and are available out in a brand new location on the ship. “In any other case the watch could be so highly effective that it’s bizarre you’re fixing some rinky-dink excessive seas homicide when you possibly can be ruling the world with it.”

By the identical guidelines, the guide needs to be passive. It could’t invoke the watch’s energy, simply can help you learn stuff. “I didn’t need these two beams crossing.” However whereas it’s passive, the guide remains to be fairly magic, a journal which binds collectively the thriller behind a doomed ship.

from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/how-a-book-binds-the-return-of-the-obra-dinn/

[brendagilliam2]

What happens when tattoo design meets illustration

Around 2010, I was hanging out with a group of tattoo artists, discussing the rising popularity of tattooing. We thought it was a wave that would soon crash, leaving only the diehard behind. How wrong we were. 

In the last seven years, the tattoo world has exploded. With the help of television, as well as social media, tattooing has been dragged out of the shadows and into the global spotlight. Where once it was looked on as an outsider art form, it is now considered at the forefront of creativity and development. 

If you look back over the history of art, whenever an art form becomes popular, it attracts artists from outside of the medium – artists who recognise that there is potential to play and expand their own creative path. 

This is true for the current trend in tattooing; one where commercial illustrators and designers are crossing over into the tattoo world. And conversely, where tattoo artists are lending their skills to commercial projects.

Designing the outcome

Nomi Chi, a tattooist and visual artist based in Vancouver, showed an interest in illustration early on. At the tender age of 12, she was trying to sell commercial art, and at 15, Chi discovered tattooing through a combination of a rebellious teenager’s attraction to the subversive side of art, plus the burgeoning growth in tattooing and the run of tattoo-related television shows and social media. 

Chi attended university, where she studied illustration, but over the years found that she had distanced herself from illustration as an applied art, and moved into an area that straddled the line between gallery art and illustration. 

“Tattooing seemed like a pretty organic development, although at the time I was determined to do concept art for video games and movies,” says Chi. “I had a lackadaisical apprenticeship, which I landed through sheer luck. At the time, I had very little knowledge of tattooing or tattoo culture, and I had only ever seen a tattoo machine once before.”

Tattooing was an organic development for visual artist Nomi Chi

Martha Smith, a tattoo artist based in London, who studied Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, also found the move into tattooing a natural progression of her artistic development – the freedom of process found within tattooing being just one aspect she was drawn to. 

While at college, Smith quickly realised that the course was incredibly concept-led. Preferring process-based work, she started printmaking, and it was with this medium that she began developing an aesthetic that would later translate into tattoos.

“I always had an interest in tattooing, but before I attended art school, most of the tattoos I saw were traditional, or realism tattoos, which never really appealed to me,” she says. 

Martha Smith’s interest in printing ignited the aesthetic that she now translates into her intricate tattoo designs

“Then, Sang Bleu Magazine came out and I was exposed to new artists such as Liam Sparkes and Maxime Buchi, who came from illustration and graphic design backgrounds, but were tattooing in a similar way to the way I printed. It was then that I thought it would be something I’d like to pursue.” 

Smith points to many parallels between the process of printing and tattooing, citing the permanence and strength of line, the understanding of the tools and the medium as examples. 

“There are also many similarities in the way a brief is structured in tattooing and illustration,” she adds. “It felt like a natural pathway into full-time illustration work, but with constant briefs and a sustainable income.” 

Guaranteed income

Both Chi and Smith moved into tattooing while keeping their illustrative careers going at the same time. The guaranteed income from tattooing gave them the freedom to pick up side work in visual art and illustration, something which is echoed in many other tattoo artists’ careers.

The converse of this approach is seen in artists such as Ollie Munden, who works as a lead designer for ilovedust, as well as having his own studio, Megamunden. His beautifully illustrated book, The Tattoo Colouring Book, came out in 2013, and was an opportunity to combine his love of illustration and tattoo design. Unlike Chi and Smith, Munden doesn’t actually tattoo. 

Aasen Stephenson is another tattoo designer, but not a tattoo artist. His work came to prominence when he used a tattoo machine to etch his designs onto a range of stylish leather shoes. 

A pair of engraved shoes by Aasen Stephenson

“I’d been doing some bits of artwork for Jeffery West, and we started to throw around the idea of customising a shoe once it had been made in-store, in front of the customers,” he recalls. 

“It took a while to figure out what would work and give the best results, but engraving seemed to be the best option.” Stephenson tried using several engravers until he hit upon the idea of using a tattoo machine, which gave good results, “and also looked cool in-store.” Although new to tattooing, Stephenson created all the designs freehand, without using stencils. 

“I just ordered a kit online,” he recalls. “Originally, we went with the cheapest, as I still didn’t know if a tattoo machine would give the best results. The kit was £55, you can imagine how bad it was! But it was a start and since then I’ve bought better machines.” 

Liz Clements has always loved traditional tattoos

With previous experience as a body piercer, Liz Clements took a slightly different route into tattoo design. Having enjoyed the studio environment of piercing, she did a pop-up shop with Occult Tattoo in Brighton, who ended up taking her on as an apprentice. 

“A lot of my illustrations were inspired by tattoo culture, so in terms of the themes there isn’t a lot of difference,” she says. “I have always really loved traditional tattoos and I think that’s evident in both my tattoos and my illustrations.” 

Transferrable skills

But what can artists interested in combining the two mediums expect when they start to move between them? As with all artistic endeavours, there is no limit but the imagination. However, Smith believes that her college introduction to illustration helped make the transition easier. 

“My studies certainly helped with tattooing,” she states. “Illustration projects have a quick turnaround with a quick brief. This helped when it came to working alongside customers to develop their custom tattoo designs.” Smith also cites printmaking as having helped her tattooing. 

“For one, it strengthens your arm and shoulders, as well as getting you used to the permanence of an image. People that are used to drawing in pencil, or painting in oils, have a transformative way of creating, where things can be edited, evolved and manipulated. With a woodblock, or a piece of lino, once that mark is carved, it is carved, much like a tattoo,” she explains.

Martha Smith’s unique tattooing style was born of her love of graphic design and printing

As with any crossover in art, the challenge is in identifying what works in the change of mediums, and what has to be adapted. For Chi, these differences are nothing more than a mindset – a different approach to a similar outcome. “My tattoo process is very particular. I try to be very transparent with regards to my interests and the stylistic direction in my portfolio,” Chi explains. 

“When I tattoo, I feel people know what they’re getting. When I am taking project requests, I look primarily at the subject matter and secondarily at the narrative behind the subject, if my client provides one. When working as a visual artist, I work best when I’m given some preferences for subjects and stylistic direction, and am allowed to compose the elements however I see fit.”

Design challenges

Liz Clements found the move across to tattooing a little challenging. “The practical side is totally different, so I have to balance the complexity of my designs to correspond with my skill set, which I have found quite tough,” she says, adding that designing to fit a body part is totally different to working on a flat surface. 

“I often do three or four tracings when I’m creating the stencil for tattoo, so the image kind of builds up in layers, and you have to rearrange as you go through the design process. For this reason, Clements thinks that tattoo design is a lot more complicated and long-winded compared to designing for print. 

For Stephenson, moving completely into the world of tattooing is a path that remains unexplored for the moment. “I’ve thought about it a lot, but not made the step yet,” he says. “I guess it’s because I enjoy getting tattooed. I think if I learned how to tattoo, I may not look forward to getting tattooed.” 

Aasen Stephenson hand-engraving leather

Explaining this idea further, Stephenson recalls his previous experience of learning the guitar. “I was always in awe of people who played, but then as I started to learn, I viewed guitarists differently,” he says. “I’d think to myself, ‘Ah, I know how to do that now!’ It kind of took the magic away. Therefore, I guess, I will always want to get tattooed, rather than actually do it,” he smiles.

But this hasn’t stopped people getting Stephenson’s designs etched into their skin. Besides his paper cutting work, he has also drawn up a few designs specifically for tattoo purposes. “I love the idea of getting my work tattooed on skin, it’s such an honour for someone to give you that trust, to be with them forever,” he remarks.

Munden has also had his work tattooed onto clients, but has reservations about this approach. “Prior to creating the book, I’d designed quite a few tattoos for people. It was, and still is, something I’m on the fence about, as I’m not a trained tattooist,” he explains. “There are so many amazing tattoo artists out there, I find it a bit backwards coming to me for the design. I always tell anyone that asks that it is the most expensive way to get a tattoo and probably not the best.” 

Ollie Munden’s tattoo themed colouring book features over 100 designs inspired by Japanese and Western tattooing

Munden did, however, design his left sleeve piece, and learned a lot about placement and how much detail should be included, or left out, along the way. Since the release of The Tattoo Colouring Book, he has also started to see more of his designs tattooed on other people. 

“I’ve seen the book pop up in various tattoo parlours and I’ve had lots of people tag me on Instagram in pieces they’ve had tattooed from the book. Some people write to me and ask permission, some send me a picture once it’s done, either way it’s all good with me. I love seeing that the work has been well received and people are getting tattooed,” he grins.

When to say no

Managing expectations and knowing when to back off a brief is important, whether you are working on or off skin. As Chi points out, tattooing is high demand work. Unlike a commercial brief, you are often expected to come up with ideas on the fly. But at the end of the day, a brief is a brief and knowing your limits is important.

“At the moment, I struggle to keep up with demand, as a result I have to turn down most proposals which are sent to me,” says Chi, who does not show her drawings to clients prior to the day they’re getting tattooed. “I have had many frustrating years of back and forth interactions between clients, and from that I developed my intake process and bedside manner,” she explains.

Many of Nomi Chi’s tattoos feature animals, or hybrid animal/human forms

Though Stephenson doesn’t tattoo, the approach to his illustrative process is similar to that of a tattoo artist, where compromise and reworking are often a necessary evil. 

“All my work is commission-based, so I do have to go through it with the client to ensure that we are both happy. Sometimes customers can come in with some crazy ideas, which is great! But once on paper it doesn’t always work,” he admits. 

Over time, Stephenson has learned to avoid briefs that he can’t do technically, or doesn’t want to put his name to as he doesn’t think they’ll work. “Getting things wrong is all part of the journey,” he says. “And being self-employed, there is no boss you can ask when you get stuck. Over time you learn and hopefully it gets easier!”

Munden has also learnt what will work and what won’t over the years. “In my commercial illustration work, I’ve passed projects over to fellow illustrators because I’m too stretched for time and would rather someone else give the client a better end result. Other times, I don’t feel I’m right for the project,” he explains. 

Four back piece designs feature as large-scale prints in high-end Japanese restaurant Tattu in Manchester, UK

“It’s important the work I do take on is close to my interests,” he says. “I want to make sure I’m giving each project 100 per cent dedication. It’s a nice position to be in as I’m not solely relying on Megamunden to pay my bills, but it also means anyone coming to me for what I do will get a quality end result. I make sure of that.”

So what does all this mean for artists, on skin and off? It’s unnatural for creativity to be limited, and art should ideally have no boundaries. Therefore, any crossover or middle ground for artists to explore should be nurtured and encouraged. 

And with the art world turning towards tattooing as a new field for expansion, the crossover is creating a generation of artists who continue to blur the lines. This allows for more growth in creativity in general, and a lot more people sporting beautiful designs that will stay with them forever.

Related articles:

3 tips for designing tattoos

45 inspirational examples of tattoo art

23 designers and their awesome tattoos

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