#also funny thing my art likes to turn inconsistent with its style so

[krazydraws]

Mb I died again ya’ll hollow knight took over me

[antiloreolympus]

5 Anti LO Asks

(Note: All of these asks are before episode 206 (Season 2 finale) so some may be dated.) 1. it's always privileged ppl who are LO's biggest fans because they can see themselves in persephone's shoes :/ meanwhile nymphs are actively looked down upon and its written off as "funny" or "deserved" (minthe deserved better)

this comic sucks lol

2. I see a lot of people say the early art was more detailed but tbh it really wasn't? the quality was very loose and inconsistent, but what made it interesting was it was more fantasy like with strong composition and use of color/contrast (which LBR here, it's a few more swipes of a brush, it not that much more work if at all) which makes it's decline into such flat, static poses and colors all the more jarring. Her style has if anything become more complicated technical-wise and its worse for it.

3. What’s confusing to me about Eris’ design (wow she really only showed up for two episodes huh) is why does she look like a off brand harpy? Why do the rest of her family just look like people but she’s the random one out? Hell, why in general does it seem Rachel’s only extent into anything beyond boxy man/tiny and curvy woman is at best wings and maybe some horns? She clearly struggles with same faces/bodies yet does nothing to tell anyone apart. It’s so weird and lazy.

4. See it's funny because Rachel is framing Apollo as bad for loving his mother and being loyal to her, but Hades is framed as good for being so loyal to his mother who quite literally gave up trying to protect him and happily had TWO MORE kids with his father while he was imprisoned in his stomach. I get their situations are different and all but Rhea has done nothing to deserve such unquestioned loyalty and love while we're supposed to hate Leto because Rachel said so.

5. So with the new episodes - canonically 10 yrs have passed right? So Persephone should be 30 now (cause I think the last time we saw her she was 20?) - but she looks and acts the same? (Actually I take it back she seems to have regressed character wise) And yes, I know there's that thing RS set up where Persephone stops aging so she looks the same (so she doesnt have to draw Persephone any different / older I guess) but after 10 yrs we see her.. Basically mope around, talk to a tree of Hades and act like the same teen she was yrs ago. She does start to take ownership of her actions then Immediately pulls back on the statement with a very haunty look on her face as she states "well its not All my fault" which semes to imply she doesnt think she should be punished for the murder she commited?? And then she goes on to talk about how she thinks her green hands are a turn off as though this is her biggest concern? And later we see her mope about then act excited about her ears getting pierced so it doesnt seem like shes taking her job of regulating spring very seriously. And she asks zeus to send a letter to Hades but doesn't ask to see her aging mortal mother? Not even the nymphs seem concerned about Demeters whereabouts cause their too busy fawning over the idea of persephone having sex with Hades At Last (which is implied when they give her a condom - like props for trying to promote safe sex but still).

Things that seemed to be big deals also no longer seem to hold weight? Like minthe and Daphne are fixed no problem? As far as I know (I haven't seen the fp chapters) We don't even get to see persephones reaction to Daphne being turned into a tree nor minthes reaction to being non-plantified? Shes just chilling and is her usual sassy self?? Shes not complaining to Zeus that shes stuck with the woman who almost killed her??

Aside from that we have Apollo and Artemis being crowned and Hebe looks lile a carbon copy of her mother...

And I'm gonna actually push back on that earlier anon ask - yes techncially Artemis could have asked for anything but I doubt Zeus would've followed through with Artemis' request if she had asked for persephones banishment to be lifted. Like it would be too easy an out for Persephone plot wise so I guess she banished herself? (Idk maybe Artemis knows he wouldn't do it and her self esteem is so low that this is the next best thing in her mind.) Like I think its the same reason why Apollo asked for Leto to... Be unbanished .... but didnt ask for Persephone to be made into his wife because I don't think that's something Zeus would have budged on despite saying they Could ask for anything, he means within limits that he set. Could he do it? Sure. Would he do it? Doubtful.

[loopy777]

RE: WIPs game: do I even want to know what Dicebenders is is it another scam how many times are the Gaang gonna get arrested for scamming

No, this time it's me scamming people. XD The dice in question are the RPG Dungeons & Dragons kind.

For a while I was doing a screencap webcomic in the style of "DM of the Rings" and "Darths & Droids" with another creative fan named Captain Boomerang. I was the scriptwriter and selected the screenshots for each panel, and Capt-BA would assemble the comics and improve my scripts (a process that did frustrate me a little, as I felt locked out of the revision process, but I did like the results. I just felt like I wasn't holding up my end of the partnership a bit). I wrote a story bible explaining the characters and storytelling rules, planned out the adaptation of the entire AtLA premiere, and had less detailed plans for the rest of the series, but we only got 6 comics in before Capt-BA went on a trip and never returned to the internet. I did manage to re-establish contact with her long enough to get permission to continue the comic, but the problem is that I have no image-editing skills whatsoever.

If I could find comic-making software that I know would do what I want and be easy to use, I wouldn't mind dropping some money on it, but everything I've looked at is trying to do lots of things I don't need. I only want a way to import existing pictures into comic grids, and then easily add dialogue bubbles. That's it. But the stuff I've found is more about image-editing than comic assembly, and it takes me an hour to put together a dialogue bubble that looks good. So I have 3 scripts that were never produced, which along with the planning docs are what's in that WIP folder, and I don't ever see myself going beyond that.

Besides, someone else already managed to complete something like this, and while I'm not a fan, I don't need to be. At this point, Dicebenders is dead. I'm glad I tried it, and it's a shame it didn't work out, but I'm happy with the other projects I've done instead.

I am squatting on an empty Tumblr for it, though.

Anyway, to share something new, here's the first section of the Story Bible I wrote to make sure Capt-BA and I were on the same page in terms of characterization. The rest of the bible details the plotlines for full series.

AVATAR: THE LAST DICEBENDER

BIBLE

Premise- A small group of players attempt to run a fantasy martial arts RPG that winds up essentially becoming the Avatar saga, or something very close. The main point of the series is comedy, based mostly on ridiculous links between Avatar and RPG's. Sometimes the humor will be in the vast difference between what happens in the comic, and what happens in the cartoon with the same screenshots. Other times, the funny will come from the unexpected ways they converge.

SPIRITUAL PREDECESSORS

DM of the Rings- The original, and my personal favorite. It's a good showcase of how to run a single quest together, while using narrative jumps to skip to the good bits.

Darths & Droids- A similar project, this stands out from its predecessor in two main ways. The players and GM are more friendly with each other, and are more or less having fun with each other. There is also a running, coherent storyline in both the game and in the lives of the players.

Benders & Brawlers- This is actually an existing attempt to do Darths & Droids with Avatar. This is helpful as an example of what we DON'T want to do, retell the Avatar story in a completely straightforward manner, with RPG players behind the characters.

CHARACTERS

None of the characters will be given real names. The players shall always be referred to by their character names, although this can be done in a teasing, ironic manner. When the characters are speaking, their dialogue bubble must always be attached to an image of the character.

The Gamemaster- The GM is a female in her early teens. She is a geek, and a bit of a social outcast for it. Nevertheless, she's trying to make that work for her, although she's not quite mature enough to make it happen yet. She has just discovered RPG's, and in her enthusiasm has gone all out in starting her own campaign. The only problem is that she doesn't know how to recruit players, so she ropes her best friend and little brother into playing with her. This is the GM's first campaign, so she'll a little in over her head. She knows the mechanics of play, and what she's supposed to be doing as GM, but doesn't have the fine skill in crafting an engaging RPG experience. Still, she wants to do her best, is willing to learn, and has a positive attitude about the whole thing. The GM has a strong crush on the Sokka player, but the only way she can express it is by having all the female NPC's flirt with the Sokka character.

Katara- Female in early teens, and the GM's best friend. Katara's player was friends with the GM from when they were both in grammar school, so while they have grown up into wildly different personality types, they are fully loyal to each other. Katara is popular, and outgoing, and doesn't care or know about geek stuff at all. She's only playing the game because the GM begged her to. At first, Katara is clueless about RPG's, and frequently questions or ridicules the mechanics of the game. She never quite gets into the idea of role-playing, but quickly takes to the idea of meta-gaming. She'll have her character act like a righteous do-gooder, because completing missions and fighting bad guys earns XP. She hoards items that will boost her stats. She'll advocate abandoning a mission/plot if it doesn't pay out enough rewards. Katara's player also can tend towards trying to Mary Sue her character, but this is inconsistent and usually shot down by everyone else.

Aang- Male in junior high, and the GM's little brother. He plays simply because his sister has cajoled him into it, and there are hints that he's getting some kind of reward or payment for it. He abuses his position by forcing the GM to give him what he wants in the game, even if it breaks the rules- access to the restricted Airbender class, the ability to bend all four elements, overloaded stats, an Avatar State that protects him from dying, a magic super flying cow ride, etc. However, it's important to note that Aang's player isn't a jerk. He's just immature, and like all kids, just always goes for what he wants via the easiest path, and doesn't realize that he may be causing trouble or hurting feelings. He's enthusiastic about trying out this RPG thing, but he has trouble coming up with any action beyond attacking or retreating. He's also hyper aware that the GM and Katara are girls. He is too old for cootie concerns, but thinks that girls are fundamentally different creatures with their own incomprehensible concerns. Having a big sister, he doesn't find this a big deal, just part of life. Aang's player is too young to be a geek. He likes cartoons and sports and fantasy and school-dramas. He also tends to follow whatever his sister likes.

Sokka- Male in late teens. This guy is your quintessential RPG player. He has is own top-quality dice, he's played campaigns and systems of all kinds, and knows the tropes of the hobby cold. He's a huge geek for all things geeky, but roleplay is easily his favorite. He's a social outcast, but he's made friends among his fellow geeks, and thinks life is just fine. Sokka's player joins when he meets the GM at the comic/games shop they both frequent. The GM was buying some sourcebooks and material to support the fantasy martial arts game she's running, and Sokka noticed, asked about it, liked what he heard, and got permission to join the game. What Sokka doesn't realize, because he is a geek and neither has experience with it or realizes it's even possible, is that the GM is sweet on him. This manifests in the character Sokka's canon luck with the ladies, only kicked up a notch. *Every single* female NPC flirts with him, whether it's appropriate or not. Sometimes player Sokka notices and tries to roleplay it, and sometimes he's just plain confused. Sokka has a few quirks. His best set of dice are his Lucky Red Dice, which always roll high when he needs it, but have been tested and proven to be fair dice. He also mandates that every character he plays use a boomerang; he was turned into a geek by the first video game he ever played, a Legend of Zelda title, and his favorite weapon from those games are the boomerang. Each of his characters has a unique, named boomerang.

Zuko- The GM's favorite NPC. She created him to be a compelling, dramatic character, with a complicated back story, moral struggles, badass loner personality, angst about his existence, a darkly noble quality, and a cool scar. The GM intended Katara to get to know Zuko, for her to try to woo him away from the side of evil, and perhaps to even have a romance with him. The PC's, however, couldn't care less about him. To them, he's just another mini-boss, and the fact that most of his character development is happening "off screen" means they don't realize that he's recruitable. A frequent gag is Zuko delivering a stirring monologue while no one pays attention.

Iroh- Background NPC. The GM tries to use him to give (ignored) hints to the players.

Toph- (tentative) A male munchkin gamer who picked a long list of weaknesses in order to get superbending. Toph's player is a friend of Sokka's player, brought in after an "incident" with his old group, and causes some initial resentment in the group when tries to show the n00bs how its done. Cowing Toph's player is a major victory for the GM.

Momo- NPC, but maybe make him a talking sidekick who gives the players hints when the GM is really exasperated?

Azula- the GM's best favorite villain. Azula is the GM unleashed, letting her take out frustrations on the players in both combat and harsh taunting. Eventually the GM comes to like the character so much, she retcons mental health issues into the character's backstory, and has her pet NPC, Zuko, spare her.

[blapisblogs]

The song ends with Chambers’s student character asking if the kids being taken away by train was a reference to World War II and if that was meant to be a comparison to high school. That’s... partly right? She’s right when she says it’s most likely a reference to World War II: there was a point in time where citizens in Britain, including children, were sent by train to other places where they were less likely to be attacked in an aerial strike, and it’s possibly referencing that. However, from the way Doug Walker writes about this part it makes it sound like this is referencing how Jewish people were taken to concentration camps in World War II, which... I could at least see where one might think that, but I’m not sure if that’s the case. What I find weird about this is that Doug should know about England evacuating people during World War II since he has talked about at least two other movies that take place in England during World War II years before making this “review”: Return to Neverland (a sequel to Disney’s Peter Pan) mentions the possibility of having its protagonists evacuate London, and Beknobs and Broomsticks (one of Doug’s favorite Disney movies) where three of the protagonists have already been evacuated. Funny how he doesn’t make a big deal about these Disney movies bringing up stuff from WWII but gives crap to Roger Waters - someone who was born during that time and was clearly affected by it - for bringing it up in this song, album, and film.

After Doug briefly talks with the “students” (while he’s I guess huge and has a deep voice because... I don’t know, there’s nothing in the film that’s like that), they then move onto the next parody. If you didn’t feel like rage quitting after that horrid parody of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” (and who could blame you if you did), you probably won’t be too happy to hear that the next song to get parodied in this train wreck is “Goodbye Blue Sky”. I should probably point out that, while it does come after “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” and “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” on the album, in the film it comes before it, yet here he’s acting like it still comes after it, which is wrong. He’s skipping over a lot of stuff that explains Pink’s deteriorating mental state, up to and including his father’s death during World War II and his emotionally abusive mother, which isn’t helpful for anyone unfamiliar with the material and I would argue that it paints an unfair picture of it. I don’t even understand how Doug screwed this up considering that he’s seen the film. The song itself is about the lingering fear that was left in people’s minds after World War II, and in the film it featured some gorgeous and fairly creative animation from Gerald Scarfe (who, as I found out from my girlfriend @animatedc9000, did the concept art and almost all the character designs for Disney’s Hercules years later; turns out the directors who later worked on Moana were fans of his work).

Speaking of the artwork, here’s something I’ve been mostly ignoring since the start: the visual style for this “review”. It feels confused, to put it very generously. Like many other people who’ve talked about this “review” have already pointed out, Doug Walker’s visual effects haven’t improved much over the years, and it’s especially glaring for this “review” not because the original’s visuals are better, but because he wants to make this come off as something bigger and more important than it actually is, which is boneheadedly bold of him to do considering that, even without comparing it to the original animation, the artwork for this particular sequence is total ass. I’m not asking for it to be on par with the original, but I am asking for more effort than what’s being shown here. It feels like Doug Walker isn’t putting much if any thought into how the visuals for this “review” all work together because there’s no consistency between the rest of the effects for this “review” either: there’s shitty 2D “animation” (and even calling what was put on screen here that feels like I’m giving them too much credit), an okay seconds-long animation of a stopmotion monster (which there is no stopmotion in The Wall and the monster doesn’t even remotely look like anything from the film, so what the fuck), stock footage, live action, mediocre at best green-screen, crappy stock CGI, and later in this “review” we’ll see some decent to actually good CGI (made by someone else, of course) and some 2-D-ish animation that looks so close to the film’s that I almost wonder if it was traced over the original’s. It’s a mess. It’d be one thing if this was trying to exaggerate the differences in styles in an anthology film with lots of hands in the pot and thus has differing, clashing styles (like Moonwalker or Heavy Metal, both music-related movies he’s reviewed before), but The Wall is not an anthology film nor is its style confusingly inconsistent like this “review” seems to be implying.

Also, the eagle that in the original was meant to represent the Nazis during the Blitz has the word “EGO” written on it in this “parody”. We get it already, Doug. Later a cloud saying “my problems” zaps another cloud saying “other people’s problems”, which... isn’t the impression I or plenty of others got from the film or album. Like, at all. Not even close. The story’s about one person and the issues he has in his life, sure, but nothing in it gives the impression that Pink is actively or intentionally ignoring other people’s problems or that he’s playing the Oppression Olympics against anyone else. It feels more like Doug is projecting here, but I really don’t want to play armchair psychology with this man, so let’s finally dissect the lyrics for this parody of the song many consider to be their favorite from the album and the film.

[Lyrics (and snark) below the cut]

Ooh Ooh D-D-D-Doesn’t this seem too heavy? Is World War II with monsters too silly?

[The monsters were meant to symbolize the horrors of what happened in World War II. You pointed out earlier how this film isn’t subtle, yet you somehow missed the meaning of this? Or is this supposed to be a joke? Because if it is, then it’s not funny, it just makes you look incompetent.]

Oh Roger Waters, did you ever wonder why this images of slaughter Made it in a film that also sings about how high school bites?

[It’s a movie about all the bad things that led to Pink building the metaphorical mental wall isolating himself and his emotions from the rest of the world, which involves more than just the trauma he endured as a child born during World War II that lost his father to said war (a death you never once mention in this “review” despite it being a big deal for the film, album, and Waters’s life, by the way). He got mentally and emotionally abused by the teachers because, to quote Waters about his own experience (which we can all agree Pink’s life is heavily based on) “The same kids who [were] susceptible to bullying by other kids [were] also susceptible to bullying by the teachers.” These things are connected because they’re all part of what makes Pink try to isolate himself from everyone else. For someone who goes on and on about how unsubtle this film is, you sure seem to miss the obvious.]

Ooh Ooh Is it saying anything that deep? “War’s bad”, thanks, are we supposed to weep? Sure, we’re all bummed out, but you’re losing clout in this movie

[Jesus christ, Doug, you can’t tell someone to “just get over” their trauma and then have everything solved just like that, because, sadly, that’s not how the human brain works, it’s more complicated than that.]

So long, Oscar bait song

[This song was released on the album before the movie, so even if Waters wanted it to be “Oscar bait” (which one can argue is a loaded term in a number of cases, but that’s a discussion for maybe another time) it wouldn’t be eligible to be nominated for an Oscar. I’ve heard one person put forth the idea that Doug was maybe under the impression that the album came out at the same time as the film, but if that’s the case then that just means Doug didn’t do research before writing and recording this, which is embarrassing for a big name internet reviewer in 2019. If he could take the time to binge-watch all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2013 in preparation for his review of that awful live-action movie, then there’s literally no reason he couldn’t have taken a few minutes to use a search engine to look up some basic facts on The Wall.]

Smoke a bong and it will feel less wrong So long, weird song

[I’m not one who encourages using drugs, but using a bong doesn’t sound like a bad idea right about now...]

[gloriousgwendolinechristie]

Press: Game of Thrones turned Gwendoline Christie into a cultural and style icon — now she’s plotting her next steps

She talks to Paul Flynn about breaking moulds, Star Wars and why she’s happy to be an outsider…

  EVENING STANDARD – When she was 15 years old, Gwendoline Christie would frequently skip school to head up to London.

She’d get the train from Worthing, West Sussex — where she lived with her mother, a housewife, and dad, a salesman — and make her way to the stalls in Kensington Market, obsessing over the beguiling selections of nightlife pieces on display at Hyper Hyper. She’d sit and sketch mannequins at the V&A. Hours would be whiled away browsing the rails at Vivienne Westwood. Back home, she’d test herself by covering the credits of fashion magazines to see if she had learned who designed what and why. Discovering Alexander McQueen, she says, was ‘earth-shattering, it just felt like so many of the things I loved coming together and exploding’.

To Christie, from a young age, fashion represented part of a wider life plan. ‘It was a combination of wanting to escape the unpleasant narrative that was being applied to me at school, where I was bullied terribly,’ she says, ‘and loving the transportative nature of the arts. It was about not wanting to live a prescriptive life.’

Christie had heard the word ‘unconventional’ applied to herself so many times, from such a young age, that she adopted a ‘sink or swim’ attitude to fitting in. She developed ideas about beauty every bit as armour-plated as the uniform she’s sported for the past six years as Brienne of Tarth: the character who first turned her into one of the truly iconic faces of the 2010s in Game of Thrones (although at the mention of the word icon, she blurts, ‘Pfffft! Bollocks!’ and mimes ‘Lol’ with two hands shaping the ‘L’s, her mouth forming the ‘O’).

‘You either think I’m unconventional and there’s no place for me and therefore I should disappear,’ she says, ‘or you think good, I’m happy to be on the outside. Because if this is the small-minded, mean, uncompassionate viewpoint of the inside, then I don’t want to be there. I’m happy out here with all the other leftovers, who show love and support for each other. All of the inconsistencies, complexities and ugly parts — whatever that might mean — can exist and beauty can be made out of it. That’s what I want beauty to be.’

Christie says she wept for two hours solid when she took off Brienne’s armour for the last time, filming her final scenes of the last season earlier this year. The battle for Westeros will end in early 2019. ‘It truly was the most incredible thing that happened to me,’ she says.

The triumph of Brienne of Tarth was, she says, both professional and personal. ‘I know how generic it sounds but it just was, in every sense of the word, incredible that that part should come along, made for me in a way that none of my friends would’ve identified for a second. They saw all of the fighting, the physicality, the fact that it was a character who was constantly being described as ugly. None of the people who knew me could understand why I would want to play that part.’ When the book of Christie is finally written, this will be her Damascene moment. ‘I had to cut my hair, change my body, strip off my make-up. This is not the person I have presented to the world at all.’ She graduated, in that moment, to the woman she always wanted to become.

Christie decided on her future very early on as a child: ‘When I discovered film, I couldn’t get close enough to the screen. I wanted to climb in.’ She concedes there is a link between becoming an actress and running away from yourself: ‘Oh, it’s that, 100 per cent. It’s so much easier to be other people. And it’s always in putting on the mask that you reveal yourself. It’s however people find it easiest to breathe. And that’s how I find it easiest.’

What has happened since has astonished her. Just because she ‘always wanted to blow it up from the inside’ doesn’t mean she expected to. She has now been part of two defining franchises of the decade, first as Brienne, then as Captain Phasma in Star Wars. At her first Star Wars Comic-Con, she found herself in a green room beside Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. ‘I try to be gracious in these moments,’ she nods, ‘but I’m an idiot, so you do just internally scream and dissolve on the floor and can’t really cope and go bright red.’ Of the late Fisher, she says ‘her mind was so fast and so hysterically funny that she would set up a joke, you would laugh, then she would push it further… you would laugh even more and then she’d push it further again and you’d laugh so much that you thought your eyes were going to fall out.’

‘Extraordinary things’ keep happening to Christie. There was the moment Dame Diana Rigg came up to her at an airport lounge and said how excited she was to be working with her. ‘Just being around her was an absolute masterclass. She’s a sensational performer but she’s a sensational person, too. We had dinner, we walked around together, we went shopping, bought hats, went in antique shops and then we had an amazing, juicy, salacious, hilarious dinner together.’ Obviously I want to know every detail. ‘Obviously I can tell you not a single one of them.’

There was also the time when Kate Moss spotted her at a Miu Miu party in 2012, and suggested she give her agent a call. She was a year into her relevatory role on Thrones. The supermodel took Christie over with her when she established her own agency. ‘She told me recently, “I just knew it would work,”’ she notes, still slightly flabbergasted by the turn of events. With pleasing circularity, Christie is currently one of the faces of Miu Miu in its arrestingly Warhol-esque ad campaign. ‘These things are wild to me,’ she says, quietly.

Christie lives in London with Giles Deacon, 49, her partner of five years. Of course she would end up with a couturier. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever stop being in awe of my partner’s colossal talent,’ she says. ‘As a designer and as a human being. I mean it. I don’t ever talk about him. But I really mean that.’ She has been keeping an occasional memoir of the astonishing experiences that have traced her past decade. ‘I don’t [write] every day, because I’m doing my best to be present in so many of the extraordinary things that have happened.’ She’s tried to stop taking photographs, to obsessively document life from one step’s remove, for the benefit of others. ‘It’s too easy to retreat into, “How am I going to frame this? How am I going to capture it?” I’m doing my best just to have those experiences and writing a few things to come back to.’

There are no plans, as yet, to publish. These are for personal use. But she’s picturing the future scene already. ‘I can dress as Barbara Cartland, on a chaise, with my seven Pomeranians — no, Pekingese, like Mrs Pumphrey in All Creatures Great and Small — me, in bri-nylon, lounging with a duchess satin slipper and a warm glass of white wine, Tuesday, 4pm. That sounds perfect to me.’

       Gallery Links:

Photoshoots > Photoshoots in 2018 > Photoshoot 002

Magazines Scans > Scans in 2018 > 2018 Evening Standard – September 14

    Press: Game of Thrones turned Gwendoline Christie into a cultural and style icon — now she’s plotting her next steps was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline | Gwendoline Christie Fansite

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2018, Part II

Part I is here. Let’s keep it moving. ENDEARING CURIOSITIES WITH BIG FLAWS

103. Zama (Lucretia Martel)- In this movie there's a motif of Zama, an officer of the 18th century Spanish Empire, starting a scene by talking to someone or staring at someone off camera. After a minute or two, the camera cuts to some servant and disorients us. There's a person there, always there, to serve him, and it doesn't really matter who it is. It's a brilliant way to get at the colonialism that the character depends on but is still trapped by. So I get a little bit of what the film is trying to do, but it's boring. I'm an ignorant person who doesn't know how to watch Lucretia Martel's films or have any context for South American history, but I know what boring is. 102. I Feel Pretty (Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein)- I like that Schumer tried something different instead of falling back on her persona, but there isn't enough new or interesting here for me to recommend--besides National Treasure Michelle Williams, of course. The film nearly displays "Do you see that she's turning her back on her real friends now?" on the screen. 101. A Simple Favor (Paul Feig)- At times cheeky and sexy and juicy, but it still wears out its welcome by twists ninety-one and ninety-two. 100. Double Lover (Francois Ozon)- Diverting until it gets silly, then so silly that it gets diverting again. There are about five too many twists, and I'm still unclear on how seriously the film takes any of those twists. More importantly, I don't think there's much of a takeaway from any of it. Ozon seems to have found a real muse in Marine Vacth though. 99. Borg Vs. McEnroe (Janus Metz Pedersen)- As a Shia Pet, I felt obligated to see his portrayal of Johnny Mac. I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know from this mediocre biopic though. Watch the documentary McEnroe/Borg: Fire & Ice instead. 98. Ralph Breaks the Internet (Rich Moore and Phil Johnston)- There's some clever visualization of the the Internet, such as the way that a link shuttles an avatar off in a transparent car or the way that shady newsboy types whisper about pop-up ads. And I liked a lot of the Disney tie-in stuff that critics are wincing at. As far as textbook screenwriting goes, it's great at that idea of making you think that the protagonists will accomplish their goal very easily, only to have them be re-directed to square one. The voice acting is top-notch. Why do these movies get so plotty though? I felt as if the internal logic started getting inconsistent about halfway through--at the same time that the first one got bogged down with candy stuff instead of 8-bit video game stuff. And if there are so many lovable characters from the first entry, why do we get such tiny servings of them here? The movie's too long already, but what I wouldn't give for an occasional cut back to Fix-It Felix raising some kids.

97. We the Animals (Jeremiah Zagar)- The Tree of Life is one of my favorite movies, and on its face, We the Animals is a really similar impressionistic memory. So why do I like it half as much? Are lighting and music that important? Is Jessica Chastain? Is latent racism? All I know is that this felt like a story I had seen before pitched at the same intensity for a running time I was happy to see expire. 96. Kodachrome (Mark Raso)- The three leads are all pretty good. (Ed Harris does this bashful, pulling-on-his-eyelid thing that killed me.) But with mathematical precision, the film matched each element I liked with another thing that infuriated me. Specifically, the whole plot hinges on one scene, and that scene is preposterous and alien to human behavior. 95. Deadpool 2 (David Leitch)- The pacing of these movies is bizarre to me; they're half-over before they really get started. No one else is bothered by the fact that Cable has no motivation or backstory for the first hour? Some of the connections to X-Men felt more forced this time around, but I thought this entry was much funnier than the first, even mixing in some more subtle visual gags. (The exotic locales montage ending in Biloxi really got me.) I have to give credit to the X-Force parachute sequence, which is audacious and unexpected. And clear out for Zazie Beetz, who is a huge star in the making. 94. At Eternity’s Gate (Julian Schnabel)- Something about Van Gogh was essentially unknowable, which is a great reason to make a movie about him and a terrible reason to make a movie about him. I'm not sure that Julian Schnabel got to the bottom of the man any better than anyone else has, though maybe that's an unfair expectation. To his credit, Schnabel yada-yadas the ear business and Van Gogh's death in favor of his more poetic understanding of the artistic life. The movie doesn't coalesce for me, but there's a banger of a scene between Dafoe and Mads Mikkelsen about the responsibility an artist has toward God. That short nested inside makes the whole thing worth seeing. The conversation I had afterwards with one of the two other people in the theater, an art historian, was a solid three stars. 93. Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer)- Some biographical movies do a good job of compressing time, and their supporting characters don't feel sacrificed or glossed over. For many other mediocre ones though, including this one, I submit the Three Scene Rule. Three scenes is kind of the minimum for a character to register an arc and for an actor to present any kind of dynamic performance, so in a lot of these true story movies, that's all that a supporting character gets. If you're looking for it, it's glaring. (Watch Hidden Figures again with the husband and boyfriend characters in mind. I'll wait.) This movie has a few characters that matter: Freddie Mercury, obvs; the other Queen members; Paul Prenter, the unfairly composited villain; and Mary Austin, the platonic love of Mercury's life. The movie spends way too much time on her, as if to tease the audience with the idea that Freddie might be straight. As for everyone else? Three scenes. Ray Foster, the record executive played by Mike Myers (!): A. "Look, guys, I like formulas. This opera stuff you're talking about? That sounds crazy." B. "The opera stuff is crazy. I ain't making that the single. You can walk out of here for all I care." C. [hangs head in shame after being proven wrong] Jim Hutton, Freddie's partner for the seven years this movie doesn't care about: A. "Look, pal, I may be a waiter, but you can't just grab me like that. On second thought, let's talk. You should learn how to love yourself." B. "Oh, hey. Glad you tracked me down, slugger. You love yourself now? Sure, let's go meet your parents." C. "Guess I'm your boyfriend now. Looking forward to the show." Freddie's Parents: A. "You go out every night! What are you doing out there? Why can't you be a good boy? What's up with your new name?" B. "Why can't you be a good boy? What's up with your new name?" C. "You're a good boy, I guess, even if you're gay. Guess that's your name for real." I like the idea of reproducing the Live Aid performance in full, and the movie comes alive during its musical sequences. But I wish that the same attention given to, like, the number of Pepsi cups on the piano was also given to the nuts and bolts of the storytelling.

92. The Predator (Shane Black)-  I get why other people don't like this. The final fourth feels obligatory, and it seems cut to the verge of incoherence. But if you don't get a little tingle out of a game cast saying Shane Black things like, "Predators don't just sit around making hats out of rib cages," then we are very different moviegoers.

91. Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)- I admire Boots Riley's ambition, the way he's taking many of the ideas that drove his music and channeling them into film. But there are too many ideas and, strangely, too much plot to cohere. I liked some of the jokes, especially the Robocop-py TV clips laced throughout. I think my main problem, however, is Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius. He's a fascinating actor, but his energy is completely wrong for an everyman lead like this. I don't think he was the right choice to carry it. 90. Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley)- The repartee at the beginning is sharp, and there are some engaging elements of style. God knows I've never complained about rich, sad, nubile brunettes with strange eyes. But there are pieces missing in that forest-for-the-trees way that happens sometimes with debuts. Like, how do these privileged girls not have access to a gun when our national nightmare is based on all young people having access to guns? Or what is the exact motivation behind the crime at the center? Lots of great characters have been spurred by a violent curiosity, but a zinger here and there doesn't make these girls Raskolnikov. 89. White Boy Rick (Yann DeMange)- Even if this isn't it, I think Yann Demange has a great film in him. There's some urgency to White Boy Rick's politics, and it looks interesting. If nothing else, it succeeds in making the surroundings seem as gloomy as the characters all acknowledge them to be. But this isn't a great film in either of its halves. It's motivated by plot until a crucial event that I don't want to reveal, then it veers much more into character. I would normally sign off on that, but this movie grinds to a halt in the change and never recovers. McConaughey pulls his weight, but Richie Merritt is pretty bad in the lead. 88. The Strangers: Prey at Night (Johannes Roberts)- Despite some striking images and a welcome lack of explanation for the menace, Prey at Night doesn't reach the heights of its predecessor, mostly because the characters are too paint-by-numbers. 87. Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed)- Probably the first Marvel movie that would benefit from more action. Some of the material is genuinely funny thanks to Michael Pena and Randall Park, but I got a little drowsy during the middle hour of talk about phase-shifting and the quantum realm. Get back to making things big or making things little, Dr. Molecule! 86. Creed II (Steven Caple Jr.)- The pieces are there, but it's a problem when Jim Lampley, who has one hundred times as many lines as the fifth lead, explains to the audience what they literally saw an hour earlier. If nothing else, this movie proves, through his absence, how good of a director Ryan Coogler is. I would be lying if I said I didn't get the chills at some key moments. Stallone’s performance and Jordan's muscles are good. But there was a dark, honest way for this movie to end, and it went directly against that ending into something more Hollywood. 85. Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)- Like Taxi Driver if Travis Bickle just wanted the guy to get him a glass of water afterwards. The film does have that kind of myopic focus--the sexy, ever-candid Binoche is in every scene--but it's far more elliptical, progressing only through character, never through plot. Let the Sunshine In is unique in a way that is different from Denis's other unique works: No one talks like an actual person, and she acts as if you should know all of the characters instead of properly introducing them. It's not supposed to be funny ha-ha, so excuse me if that's what I wanted.

84. Revenge (Coralie Fargeat)-  like the style of this film, the color palette, the synth score, how far it's willing to go with the gore. But if it's called Revenge, and it's clear who the hero is (hint: not the rapist), then the whole thing feels like a fait accompli. We know exactly who's going to be the last woman standing, and we even know the order of the people she's going to kill.

PRETTY GOOD MOVIES 83. The Rider (Chloe Zhao)- This movie is trying to be a poem, but the parts I like the most are prose. It's a promising piece of filmmaking with heartbreaking moments, but I found it most effective when the storytelling spelled things out. It's an all-hands-on-deck independent film, so the amateurism of the piece shines through in the performances from non-professional actors. The relationship between Brady and his autistic sister is interesting because she speaks with that sarcastic cadence that can be learned from only children's programming. It's unlike what we usually see because, you know, she's a non-professional actor and real autistic person. So what do I know? 82. Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco)- Pretty tight from a storytelling standpoint and definitely grisly enough to get under the skin. But these laptop flicks move with such alacrity that it's hard to believe them whenever they ask you to buy something like love, since they paint it with the broadest strokes imaginable. Not that I would want a two-hour version of this anyway. 81. Juliet, Naked (Jesse Peretz)- Charming enough, arriving at a more realistic place than I expected, Juliet, Naked does nothing to make me revoke my charter membership in the Rose Byrne fan club. What an odd shape this film has though. The inciting incident happens at the hour mark, and it races obligatorily to an ending at an hour, thirty-seven. 80. Ocean’s Eight (Gary Ross)- It sets its marks and hits them adequately, with most of the charm that made the other Ocean movies fun. But there's something lifeless about Ocean's 8, both in the direction and the score. Take, for example, Richard Armitage's bland, sort of lost performance as an old flame/mark. It's such a nothing part that I began to think that it was a thesis: The men are just chess pieces, and they shouldn't take attention away from the women this time. But then James Corden emerges in the last half-hour and shines. So maybe Armitage was just bad and directed poorly? This movie exists for the Movie Star interplay though, and it delivers on that level. Cate Blanchett was good for so long that she's popular, and Sandra Bullock was popular for so long that she's good. Rihanna has to dress like a janitor at one point as a disguise, and she proves how absurd it would be for her to ever blend in. Anne Hathaway is the funniest of the bunch, balancing on a highwire of how big she's supposed to seem. Helena Bonham Carter gets the "and" hammer for all my credit fetishists. 79. Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall)- I saw this on Christmas night with my family. The original Mary Poppins was the first movie my mom ever saw in theaters, and it's probably my wife's favorite. To the extent that insulting it is kind of insulting an important part of who she is. So I couldn't be the guy coming out of the theater like, "The Bankses definitely deserved to lose their house." Between you and me though, it's just fine. Entire sequences could be cut without damaging anything--do we ever come back to the bowl that Meryl Steep is supposed to be mending?--and most of the conflict feels manufactured. These legasequels always end up feeling like boxes being checked. We all know that the guys with the cannon had to come back, right? But some of the numbers are so joyful or stirring that even this grinch snuck a few smiles at his daughter as she pointed to the screen and said, "That's so silly." It's a good movie to see on Christmas night with your whole family. 78. RBG (Betsy West, Julie Cohen)- This movie is designed to make the viewer who would seek it out go, "What an American hero." It does that, I suppose, and there isn't a whole lot wrong with it. Yes, she is a very impressive person. But the film has too much untapped potential and too few teeth to recommend beyond that rubric of achieving its goals. For example, what about half of the population that would sneer at the notion that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an American hero? Besides the inclusion of some radio clips over the credits, the filmmakers aren't concerned. "Look, she was friends with a conservative!"

77. Searching (Aneesh Shaganty)- Since I've seen thousands of movies that don't take place inside of a computer, there's still some novelty to the handful that do. On one hand, there are four or five twists too many, and the film isn't consistent with its own rules. On the other hand, it gets intriguingly dark for PG-13, and it never stops moving. 76. Uncle Drew (Charles Stone III)- The attitude toward women is retrograde, and to call the plot cookie-cutter would be an understatement. But this works, mostly because of the sunny, natural performances. Kyrie Irving, whose handles are even more of a marvel on a forty-foot screen, has to act through pounds of makeup, but he pulls it off. With only commercials to his name, he has to carry scenes of, like, standing at someone's grave and apologizing, and he has the presence and confidence to do it. I also should mention that Nick Kroll has a nothing-to-lose, galaxy brain performance for which probably zero of the lines were written ahead of time. "Shout-out to Oberto, shout-out to Aleve, the number one pain reliever in the game right now." I have to extend some of the credit here to Charles Stone III, who has made a calling card out of coaxing performances from newcomers. 75. Christopher Robin (Marc Forster)- Cute. 74. Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)- What seems to be a B-movie hitting its marks gets elevated by one fantastic scene that makes it seem timely and vital. I can't help but think Steven Soderbergh is punching below his weigh class though. I'm glad that an experiment like shooting a movie with an iPhone gets him up in the morning, and I know he doesn't want to make another Traffic or Out of Sight. But maybe, here's an idea, audiences might? 73. 22 July (Paul Greengrass)- The first thirty minutes are harrowing, in part because of their disciplined cross-cutting and Anders Danielsen Lie's chilling stoicism. The mistake that Greengrass makes is thinking that, later on, the three strands of story are equal in importance. He cuts away from the court case at its apex to see a kid trying to walk again or a prime minister demanding that his administration get tougher. Some moments are powerful, and Greengrass's composition and editing have mercifully softened, but this becomes a grind at a certain point. 72. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard)- I hate to state the obvious, but this feels like multiple movies stitched together because that's exactly what it is. On one hand, we have the foggy opening, featuring an airtight inciting incident and setting up Emilia Clarke as that rarest of things in a Star Wars movie: a character with unclear motivations. But as the film goes on, it reveals why Han doesn't work as a protagonist. (Ehrenreich is bad, but the storytelling sinks the movie more than his performance does.) Everyone else in the movie drips with charisma and comments on the action while Han is left to connect the dots. In other words, the other characters get to be Han Solo, and Han Solo doesn't. By the time we get to the marauders, past the two hour mark of a movie that shouldn't have been more than two hours, the narrative crumbles under its own weight. These movies are way too competent to fail--I can list five or six moments that transcend the flaws--but each of these origin stories has a way of erasing the myth of Star Wars with a pen. 71. Bird Box (Susanne Bier)- This is a genre film that you've seen before in one way or another, so your expectations (and filmgoing experience even?) will dictate what you think of it. There's a metaphorical reading available, but that doesn't make the picture more artful automatically. Trevante Rhodes is a Movie Star. Here's what I can tell you: We need to appreciate John Gavin Malkovich while we can. Delivering the apotheosis of the selfish dickhead survivor character, he a) asks why the group can't stay in the grocery store forever, b) points shotguns at people when they try to let in strangers, c) drinks as he's telling people matter-of-factly that this is the end of the world, and d) (sort of) explains why he is the way he is. And-he-does-it-all-with-the-deliberate-cadence-that-you-are-doing-in-your-HEAD-right-NOW. I'm not saying the guy should win Best Supporting Actor or anything, but I admire his career more than any that would get a Best Supporting Actor.

[dillydallyings]

i did that style challenge that was popular like... a year ago? haha! i admire a lot of artists and i thought this might help me escape this art block, and it worked! 10/10, I recommend to all artists looking for something new to draw ^^ some notes on each thing below the cut!

My style – funny enough, this was probably one of the hardest drawings for me, and it’s one of my least favourites of the bunch! It’s actually really hard to try and mimic your own style if you change as often as I do. So, instead, I decided to go with THOA’s style for the first few chapters, as it’s (somewhat) consistent! (Also, didn’t mean for him to look so small but my wrist was killing me too much to fix this by the end of it!)

@lavendertowne – Haley is probably my fav artist on youtube because her videos are so soothing and helpful! Honestly, sometimes I look forward to just listening to her voice… and her art style is so bouncy and unique, so I was really excited to try it out! One of my favourite things to recreate were the eyes; I realized halfway through that they’re not circle shaped, but more angular instead? It’s interesting how copying a seemingly simple art style makes all the little details pop out at you. And it’s not as easy as it looks! It took me so many attempts to draw the eyes and the mouth, which look like they’d be the easiest... Honestly though, this one was my favourite to draw and my fav outcome. Haley’s style is just so different from mine that it was a super refreshing change!

Pokemon Sun/Moon – Pokemon is what got me drawing in the first place, and has been in my life since I was around 8 years old... so of course I had to draw in its style! I decided to choose the more recent games for reference as I thought it’d be easier, but NOPE. It was so hard;;; My shaky hands really struggle at crisp lines, but it was a fun challenge!

Nozmo – Nozmo has been a major influence on my art since the beginning of highschool, particularly because of her comic “todd and the petunia violet”. Even though it’s been cancelled, it still takes all my willpower not to try and recommend this story to everyone, since it had such a major effect on my life... it was my first real comic influence tbh! So, I really tried my best to do her justice! Although I was really unskilled back then, this was rather shockin for me because Luke used to look like a rougher (uglier) version of this... this took me on a blast to the past X_X

Animal Crossing – LMAO I mostly wanted to do this for a challenge, and it really was one… omf. I gave up on perfecting it hahaah. Even though it’s nowhere near as polished as animal crossing art is, I actually think this Luke is really cute~

The Moonrise During the Day / The Moon That Rises During the Day – I’m really happy with how this one turned out! Though I think I made Luke look a little bit too similar to Joon oh, it was so fun recreating my favourite webtoon’s style. It was actually pretty easy as there’s a lot of similarities between it and my general art style, EXCEPT for the hair. Holy hell. I honestly couldn’t get the shading right for the hair at all, but I tried my best T__T’’

Fruits Basket – I had to draw my introduction to shoujo or I’d feel like I was betraying my childhood self! I feel like little me would be so happy with this. I ended up following the anime’s style because the manga is pretty inconsistent art wise, though I don’t think I captured the pointiness of the Shoujo style as much as I could have. I have certain gripes with aspects of the FB art style, so I think I unconsciously modified some of them here – which sucks! I might go back and edit it later haha

Super Secret – One of my more recent favourite webtoons! I really like how fluffy and – delicate? – this art style is. I’m not used to such simple styles, making it another challenge! I find the simple styles to be the most difficult to recreate ^^;

Omyo – Omyo is another great webtoon artist, this time of two of my faves (the stories of those around me, and salty studio! Check em out on webtoon)! I went with the Salty Studio style for this, sorta. Instead of copying the actual comic’s artwork, I mimicked the end cards instead, since they’re always so colourful and pastel!

Anyways!! If you read this far, wowie, I’m honoured! Thanks a bunch <3 I think everyone should try this if they’re bored tbh, it was so fun!!

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Conquest Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Conquest Part 1

Chapters 15-20, in which there is finally a goal, and it is stupid.

Chapter 15

a.k.a. the teaser for Revelation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like that Valla has some visible presence outside of its dedicated route, and the otherworldly visuals and shadowy enemies do a lot to sell the mystery of the place and make the player want to learn more about it. Also, this chapter isn’t just randomly dropped into the middle of Conquest’s plot, but rather a culmination of events that begins in Chapter 9 when Azura returns to Nohr. She then meets Garon, tries to exorcise Garon but only succeeds in giving him a really awkward public orgasm, and then turns to Plan B which is apparently to go dimension-hopping for a one-use plot device.

But yeah, that part is absurdly contrived and deserves all the scorn it gets in the fandom, relying as it does on two separate magical plot trinkets - the aforementioned crystal and the Hoshidan throne - and building unearned tension between Corrin and the Nohrian royals via a strange set of contrivances. Azura couldn’t have waited to use the crystal until they were all together...why, exactly? Because it can only be used once, and only at the Bottomless Canyon, and only if someone with special magic or dragon blood touches it, and then you can’t talk about it without vanishing...gah. It’s an epic pileup of lazy writing. FE10′s Blood Pacts have nothing on this moment.

At least the chapter is fun, being a big change of pace that reduces your party to three replicated units and gives you a choice of two objectives. And Gunter’s not dead, and (we assume) not evil on this route even though his situation is basically the same as it is in Revelation. That’s nice of him.

Chapter 16

What an original way of creating a timed chapter - and as a bonus I get the image of Xander and various other guys pinching the cheeks of random Nohrian soldiers! That’s just adorably weird.

What���s not so adorable but still weird is how we’re meant to believe that Shura can pass for a Nohrian until he tells everyone otherwise, because isn’t there supposed to be a noticeable racial difference between the two main regions of Fates’s setting? Maybe not apparent to the player (unless you’re intimately familiar with anime art styles, or so I’ve heard), but it’s logically supposed to be there, so...what’s up with that? Logical inconsistencies aside Shura is an interesting aspect of this chapter and an interesting character in general for how he straddles that regional divide and provides exposition both here and in Birthright that Hoshido’s not all it’s cracked up to be. In this route he reveals that Yukimura contracted him to kidnap Azura in retaliation for Garon kidnapping Corrin, adding a devious dimension to a character who is in other respects extremely underdeveloped. This is also the only route where Shura can potentially get his revenge against Mokushu, so his presence here feels timely...unless you opt to kill him and take his Boots, that is.

More on that next chapter though, because the sting of the previous’s one absurdity lingers in spite of Shura and Xander and some genuinely pleasant sibling banter (tempered by the allusions to the concubine wars and Azura’s rough treatment in Nohr that are mostly reserved for supports). No explanation is ever provided for why Garon decides to commence the invasion of Hoshido now, after devoting his forces’ time and energy to quashing a series of only tangentially-related rebellions. It feels too convenient coming as it does right after Azura explains her plan to Corrin, a means of saving Corrin from having to push for the invasion themselves. I really wish they’d done something to that effect. Corrin would shock Azura even further with their newfound ability to lie while also making a move covertly motivated by a desire to end the war as quickly as possible and so with as few lives lost on both sides. One less contrivance certainly wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Chapter 17

Everyone wants revenge against Kotaro, even NPCs. After slogging through a ninja-infested cave with spikes and a bunch of Dragon Veins that can throw you off if used at the wrong time I sympathize wholeheartedly.

What I have more trouble understanding is the moral position of the lead-up to this chapter. Corrin and co. are fine with accepting help from Kotaro until it’s revealed that he’s captured Kagero in an attempt to force the Hoshidans to surrender. The dialogue doesn’t make it sound as though they plan on killing her, but because Kotaro claims that Garon would approve of his strategy it’s suddenly horrible and deserving of immediate retribution. Corrin’s objection here runs contrary to their desire to end the war quickly by whatever means necessary including subterfuge, so aside from the knowledge gleaned across all routes that Kotaro is a self-centered opportunist who’s personally wronged both Shura and the Christmas ninjas it feels like a stretch that this is what leads to the Nohrians breaking off their strategically useful alliance with Mokushu. It’s a flimsy excuse for a frustrating chapter that doesn’t really come with a payoff later from Saizo, so I can’t say it’s one of my favorites from any angle.

Oh, and Azura apparently soloed a bunch of Hoshidans offscreen. That got a laugh out of me.

Chapter 18

Ship tease and moral dissonance for all! Well, sort of. The Ryoma/Xander stuff is funny (why does Ryoma retort that he’s more attractive? Hmm...) and Camilla gets in a quip in preparation for her final showdown with Hinoka, but all in all it’s a strange, tense moment. The fight against the renegade(?) Nohrians led by Zola provides the moral dissonance, and even though Leo provides a practical explanation for doing his usual thing and killing dark mages in cutscenes it is a bit strange to imagine that Garon wouldn’t notice all these allies and underlings of his mysteriously dying.

I find it interesting that the meeting between royals is something that occurs in Conquest but not in Birthright. As with Chapter 15 this is another example of this route doing substantially more to sell the basic premise of Revelation than its counterpart did, which makes more sense if the two of them were indeed written at about the same time after Birthright. It also provides some necessary development for Corrin’s relationship with the Hoshidan royals, something that can’t be taken for granted as it is with the Nohrians in Birthright as they didn’t grow up together. That’s all the more important to get out of the way now since they all confront Corrin one right after the other in the endgame without much time in between to really explore them as much as they ought to be. Takumi’s arc in Conquest is pretty good, sure, but the sisters are fairly static and Ryoma’s character is plagued with presentation issues on this route. I actually wish this scene could have gone on a bit longer and added a bit more to each of them, but this is what we’ve got.

Don’t really have anything to add about the chapter. It’s a recycled Birthright map that’s only interesting because you have to beat three bosses in a turn limit. Zola’s role here is minimal, as is Izana’s which is entirely a good thing.

Chapter 19

What I like about this chapter: It’s got a pretty autumnal palette not seen anywhere else in Fates that I can think of (exacerbated by the fact that this map is unique to Conquest, meaning you can never use it for skirmishes). The setup is also much stronger than the equivalent wolfskin chapter in Birthright. No Iago here - Kaden outright entraps Corrin’s army and plans to kill them all on the possibility that they might be poachers. Hoshido really benefits from having some viciousness like this of its own.

What I don’t like about the chapter: I don’t know if it’s a mistranslation or I’m just misunderstanding the game’s explanation for this chapter’s gimmick, but it clearly doesn’t work the way I first thought it did. The text blurb states that kitsune illusions (units with the green symbol on them) can neither attack nor be attacked by your units, and while it’s true that your units can’t target them they can and do attack you on the enemy phase. I don’t mind the idea of units with a single turn of player phase immunity, but it’s frustrating to feel misled into thinking it was something else entirely.

Anyway, Corrin kills all the kitsune and is sad about it, and then Azura waxes philosophic on how all routes carry sacrifice and moral greyness and it’s pretty obvious that she’s leaning on the fourth wall here. On the plus side when one considers all the named character deaths in Birthright and even the handful in Revelation it feels less like the game is specifically berating the player for choosing Conquest this time.

Chapter 20

So, uh, quick question: how are the few little huts in the desert seen here and in Birthright and the massive complex of intricately-crafted terraces and stairways that appear in the other two routes both representative of the Wind Tribe? Is Fuga loaded while his people live in squalor? 

He’s certainly a sadist, because this chapter earns its infamous reputation with its frustrating wind manipulation. I find that, not unlike FE4, this is one of several Fates chapters made easier if you’re fielding a bunch of units with holy dragon blood to use the Dragon Veins scattered throughout the map. Behold the power of kinky interspecies sex.

Similar to Azura’s musings in the previous chapter, Fuga provides Corrin with his knowledge of the Yato along with the confidence that they chose a morally righteous path after all.  As with Corrin’s pacifism something like this is near the top of the list of things not to do in a villain campaign, but the writing has long since stopped trying for that angle. It’s been repeatedly reinforced that Garon and his loyal minions are the real enemies of this campaign, and the Hoshidans are the innocent(?) victims who have to be sacrificed in order to expose Garon for what he is and end the war. Fuga sends Corrin off with his blessing to kill however many Hoshidans it takes to earn peace, including potentially all of his late BFF’s children.

...Yeah. Fuga really is kind of an ass when you think about him. 

Next time: Conquest Chapter 21 - Endgame

[the-crippled-god]

Steam Next Fest, October 2021

Here’s a few sentences on the demos I’ve played thus far. We’ll see if I get to more...

A=B: Of the genre of 'Esolang programming games' (of which there are many), this might be one of the easiest to get into. However, nearly all the fun is going to come out of weird tricks you can pull off with the new instructions added in each section, which kinda defeats the premise. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at how clever the game let me be with the the base 'one instruction'. It's not really programming, it's pattern matching and replacing (that being said, folks are starting to work out that well implemented pattern matching is one of the most powerful tools a programming language can have), and a condition that if a rule matches, the instructions start over, rather than continue. I wonder if there's any real world langs that behave like this, but support regex patterns (including capture groups), it might actually be a neat way of building things like custom file renaming rules... Games like this always feel like I'm doing work while not at work, but the simplicity of the base instruction makes this feel more like a puzzle game than something like TIS-100 or Shenzen IO, so provided the extra instructions don't make it feel more like programming (avoid adding branching, don't let me loop beyond the base loop, etc.), I'll probably enjoy this. Verdict: interesting, I'll probably buy it if it's cheap.

Galaxy's Extreme: This is another "Nintendo won't make a new F-Zero game so we'll do it ourselves", and it's... fine. Momentum feels good, and the controls feel good, it's just, too simplistic. I really feel like a spiritual successor to F-Zero needs the strafe and slide turning of GX (or some equivalent), without absurd goofy snaking, it's just, not the same, let alone an escalation of the style. You also only seem to leave the ground and prescribed points, rather than behaving like a hover craft, which doesn't quite feel right. Verdict: I'll probably pass on this one, if it gets rave reviews on release, and has online multiplayer, I could see grabbing it to play casually with friends.

Rayze: There's a good idea here, this isn't a good implementation of it. Momentum feels weird, and the game doesn't use raw mouse input, for some reason. An 'Aim racer' feels like a good idea, but this is more of a puzzle game where you're trying to work out how the level designer wants you to click things. Verdict: pass, absolutely not for me.

Dread Delusion: Open world immersive sim, focused on being weird. Seems alright, demo is a little too limited to tell, and I allocated my stats wrong to be able to see all of it (you seem to need high Lore to get to a few areas), but I enjoyed what was here, and will probably pick it up as just a weird thing to explore. Verdict: neat, be interested to see how the full version is.

Titanium Hound: This one looked cool, but it's really not good. Sounds in the menus are ear piercing, control scheme makes no sense on either the keyboard or controller. None of the attacks feel like they have impact. Controls are floaty and weird, like everything is on ice. Enemy sounds are muted, music is boring. Verdict: Really disappointed in this one, hard pass.

Transiruby: C...Cute... This seems like a fun light hearted metroidvania. Dialogue is witty, Siruby and pals are cute. Music is charming. Controls are tight. Graphics lean a little to simple for my tastes, but otherwise no complaints. Verdict: I'll probably buy this, seems like a good coping game for me.

Gastova: The Witches of Arkana: Meh. Some of the cutscene and character detail art is cute. Writing feels like it has a good premise, but could use an editor to punch up the jokes and quips a bit, since they don't quite land. It's almost like English isn't the writers first language, they have a good grasp of how to put words together so they're coherent, but they're not great at pacing dialogue so it feels natural. Gameplay is, bland? This feels aggressively like a 3rd party SNES platformer, like a Super Adventure Island or something. This is in all respects. It eats inputs randomly, attacks have no impact, enemies take too many hits, basic platoforming requires you stand on the very edge of the platforms, etc. I'm sure there are people who will get a kick out of this, but it's not for me. Verdict: pass.

Ex-Zodiac: It's a Starfox clone! Kinda halfway between SNES and 64. It's pretty good, not really doing anything original, but it plays well. Only weird issue I noticed is that enemies behind you can shoot at you, and there's not really a way to avoid it. Other than that my main complaint is the camera feels a little tight, definitely more like Starfox SNES, and it's a bit annoying. Verdict: I'll wishlist it, purchase is going to depend on the length and price of the full game.

Exo One: Interesting, likely not for me. I dig the movement scheme, though certain aspects of it suffer from the minimal UI/HUD. Manoeuvring through big wide open Unity terrain maps is not really compelling to me, I think I'd really like this if it was a more concentrated experience. Verdict: Pass, but I'll keep an eye on it.

POSTAL Brain Damaged: Hell yeah, this seems good. Think I like it more than Postal 4, at least in its current state. Writing is very Postal, except weirdly more subtle than usual? Dunno, this I like it more than Postal's usual crassness. Weapons are all versatile and cool (in the demo the rocket launcher weirdly feels the worst), and level design and aesthetics are on point. Didn't finish the demo cause I'd kinda rather play this on release, but really liked what I played. Verdict: Wishlisted, to pick up next time I'm in the mood for a boomer shooter.

Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams: I was expecting something different. This seems to be a mostly linear 1st person platformer set in a childish dreamscape. It's fine for what it is, but at least as a demo, it didn't grab me. I think Anodyne 2 did this aesthetic better, this kinda feels like someone looked at Spyro the Dragon, and decided that's what dreams looked like. Maybe it gets weirder later, but I'm not sure I want to wait around to find out. Verdict: Pass for now, but I'll check the reviews when it comes out.

Cleo: A Pirate's Tale: It's alright, for a one person game, it seems pretty dang good. But, I don't think I'll play it. Everything about it is just a little off. Writing isn't quite funny, voice acting has weird intonation and direction, controls don't quite work intuitively, art style feels a touch unrealized, etc. Definitely give this one a try, especially if you liked old LucasArts games, you might love this, but I didn't. Verdict: Pass, but I have a few friends I'll probably recommend this to.

Hunt the Night: There's a good (potentially great) game here, but it leans just a little too into being difficult/punishing for my taste. You can animation cancel into a dash, except when there's hit stun from contacting an enemy with your sword, so you can't dodge ranged attacks while you're engaged in melee? Sometimes enemies are hit stunned by your attacks, sometimes the same enemies can attack through your hits? There's no stamina bar, but there's like 4 different meters to manage, and they work pretty well at forcing you to use all the options available to you. The weapons I found seemed to only differ in attack speed, melee combos did not change meaningfully, which is disappointing, but I didn't experiment much. Otherwise, for a 'bloodborne but as top-down zelda' it seems pretty great. Story seems interesting enough, if predictable, gameplay has a lot of good ideas, but it maybe needs another round of polish. A range indicator on the dash, and a solid explanation of if I'm suppose to be using it to dodge (and when I can cancel into a dodge and when I can't), along with a clear timer on how long I need to hold the heal button, would go a long way into making the game feel more fair. Verdict: On wishlist for now, because the trailer makes it look really fun, but I'll likely take a look at the reviews on release.

Anuchard: I swear I've seen this main character design before, I think they were a cameo design in CrossCode? Oh wow is English not the writer's first language, grammar issues all over the place. Thankfully, not so bad as to be incomprehensible, but I really hope they get an editor fluent in English before release. Gameplay wise, this seems a little too simple? Combat is satisfying, but you can stun lock the boss? And while the shield/heavy attack system seems like a good idea, it doesn't add much depth. Puzzle solving by bouncing the gems around feels bad. You can't aim in more than the 8 cardinal directions, and even that's inconsistent, and hit detection requires you to be really precise. Art is cute, writing seems like it has potential, if it gets a good proof read, music was interesting to good. Verdict: I think I'll pass, but I'll look into it after release.

Marmoreal: Can you tell this game wanted to be a Touhou fangame, but the art was worse than even ZUNs so they couldn't get the license? Joking aside, ignoring every art asset in this game (except the animation, but we'll get to that), this game is great. Gameplay feels really good, though I feel I need to re-map the abilities buttons a bit, I kept hitting them at inopportune times. And, the animation in cutscenes, along with the writing, make this a stupid ridiculous romp that nearly had me falling off my chair in laughter. This game knows exactly what it is, and I'm here for it. Verdict: Wishlisted, and I'll probably play more of the demo, since it's pretty substantial.

Transmute: A very clearly inspired by Axiom Verge (and maybe Environmental Station Alpha) metroidvania. My biggest complaint is the writing falls flat. Crazy shit is happening to and around the protag, and she hardly reacts (the writing puts more emphasis on her being 'anti-colonialist' than it does on the fact that she'd been in stasis for several years). Game plays well, though not being able to shoot at an angle, or downwards feels weird. Has an augment and retrieval system like Hollow Knight. the augment system even let me combine 2 things I didn't think it would allow me to. Difficulty spikes up after the 2nd boss, so I peaked my head into the 2 areas that open up, but wasn't really interested in banging my head against them when I know I'll have to start over when the game comes out. Verdict: Seems pretty well put together for a metroidvania, I'll wishlist it.

Tunic: This seems so close to brilliance, but it's just not there. The game looks adorable, but here's the issue: There's a massive amount of latency to the controls, you constantly feel like you're manoeuvring through muck. Even the most basic enemy can react to you faster than you can to it, enemies do a lot of damage, healing is very limited, and it has retrieval mechanics on death. This game feels really difficult for no reason. It's clearly trying to look like zelda, why does it play like a wannabe took-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-dark-souls game? If this game played closer to a 2d zelda game, it'd be a lot of fun, but as it plays right now, I have no interest. Verdict: Pass.

[rhetorical-ink]

Rhetorical Ink: My Top 10 Animated Disney Films

NOTE: These are mainly my personal favorites for a number of reasons, and I’ve left Pixar films off the list for two reasons: 1.) I haven’t seen all of the Pixar films yet, like Cocoa or Inside Out I know, I know, I’ve brought ultimate shame to my house and 2.) If I included Pixar, it might mostly be a Pixar list, haha! I’ll have to make a Top Ten Pixar films in the future once I see those other two -- in the meantime -- 

My Top 10 Animated Disney Films:

10. Tangled:

I would be lying if I said that Tangled was perfect -- one of the reasons it’s so low on this list is because the climax of the film basically borrows for one of my top picks. However, I put this on the list because it was the first animated Disney film to get me excited again in Disney post-Rennaisance Era. I did see Prince and the Frog, and while I liked it, this film just had better music, more charisma, and two lead characters that stole the show and you could be invested in. Zachary Levi as “Eugene” and Mandy Moore as Rapunzel were perfect in their roles and if you look at Disney now, Rapunzel is part of the Disney Princess canon as if she’s always been there. Now if only she kept her short hair for the television show...

9. Oliver and Company:

I’m a sucker for a many things, but this film has two in one: an adaptation of a classic story (Oliver Twist), and a cast of adorable animals. I didn’t include 101 Dalmatians on this list, though it should get an honorable mention, because I love that movie -- but I think that this film has both the aesthetic style of 101 Dalmatians, that realistic, sketchy art, but also has protagonists and characters that have personality and are compelling. Don’t get me wrong, Cruella DeVil is one of the all time GREAT Disney villains, but the other characters in the story? They are sort of one-note and flat. Not here, everyone has a distinct personality, great voice acting, and expression -- even the twin Doberman henchdogs. Plus, Billy Joel is one of my favorite singers, and him playing Dodger is fantastic.

8. The Jungle Book:

It would be a crime not to include a pre-Disney Renaissance film on here. I thought about Sleeping Beauty, since Maleficent is one of the all time great Disney villains as well -- but in the end, I had to go with The Jungle Book, sheerly because of its combination of again, a great adapted story -- which I prefer actually more than Rudyard Kipling’s version (which had its own faults for another post), the incredible music and catchy songs, and the host of characters who all stand out and create a compelling story. Plus, Sher Khan was one of the scarier villains as a kid. A tiger slashing you to bits? Consider child me terrified and not going on a jungle cruise anytime soon.

7. Mulan:

This movie was a staple at my Grade School when it came out. We watched this over and over again, quoted all of the lines and karaoked “You’ll Bring Honor to Us All” and “Be a Man” until our lungs collapsed. While this movie was definitely curtailing off of Aladdin’s pop-culture-modern humor within its style, the aesthetic of the film was distinct and beautiful. Mulan was definitely ahead of her time in being a fleshed-out, realistic protagonist that even other Disney Princesses like Belle can admittedly not claim to be -- though I love Belle -- and while the film overall didn’t seem to have the “staying power” as other Disney films -- the recent excitement about the live action remake may prove me wrong.

6. The Little Mermaid: 

Making this list was hard, because there are so many films that I like parts of incredibly, but not the whole to such an extent. Of all those films, The Little Mermaid surfaces to the top because the parts I like are SO STRONG.

I will be the first to admit that The Little Mermaid isn’t a go-to movie for me. Is Ariel an ideal protagonist? She’s not the greatest, though she is endearing in several ways. Prince Eric? Well -- in the same vein as Cinderella -- he has a lot of trouble distinguishing the love of his life. However, the animation? Beautiful. The side characters? Fantastic. The villain? Ursula may be in the Top 3 villains of Disney history -- her design is flawless and she is easily the most distinct and creative in her design of the villains. But it’s the music that climbs this one above the others that I only like parts of. The music MAKES this movie. Every song is sing-a-long worthy -- even down to Ursula’s “triumphant” reprise using Ariel’s voice while in her “human” form, Vanessa. The music is perfect, which makes The Little Mermaid, despite some not-so-grand parts, make this list.

And now we are in the Top Five. #6-10, if you argued to change out one movie for another, I would not argue with you. But these five are my favorites -- hands down -- and I will defend them to the ends of the Earth! So, to start it off: 

5. A Goofy Movie:

Is this movie a complete product of the 90′s? Yes. Is the movie more of a realistic coming-of-age story than the grand epic fairy tale? Also, yes. But is this story also completely original and underrated? DOUBLE Yes!

As a child growing up in the 90′s, this movie just hit me, and hit me hard. Every teenager wanting to “stand out” could relate to Max’s inability to relate to his dad, and every kid needs a parental figure like Goofy, who wasn’t afraid to be angry at times, but also talked with his son to figure out what was going on in his life -- granted, it took a wacky road trip and near-death to do so.

A Goofy Movie has great music, underrated animation (seriously, go back and watch -- it’s well-done!), an original, funny, and touching story, and enough 90′s nostalgia and fun to keep you entertained. It’s a gem of its time and one that has stuck with me since it first came out.

4. The Lion King:

I mentioned earlier that I am a sucker for animal-cast movies and those based on classic Literature. And...The Lion King is the best of that sub-genre. I remember seeing this movie with my late Grandmother in theaters. We both bawled our eyes out when Mufasa died, and cheered at the end, when the music swelled and Simba reclaimed the throne.

This movie is simply EPIC. From the soundtrack that I listen to constantly on its own, to the gorgeous animation, to the compelling adaptation of Hamlet...The Lion King is definitely worthy of the #4 spot and for many, I’m sure, it’s #1. There’s just SO much to love. I can’t wait to see the live action adaptation -- ESPECIALLY since James Earl Jones is returning as Mufasa.

3. Wreck-It Ralph: 

I know a lot of people like Zootopia -- and I agree, it’s great! It’s topical, modern, realistic, while still being clever and combining that animal cast I clearly like in my Disney films...but...something about it just kept it from being on my Top 10 list. I didn’t realize it until last night, though, as I sat down to watch Wreck-It Ralph...and then...when it was over...I went back and watched it again.

It’s “staying power” that I think gives it the edge over Zootopia, and also puts it so high on this list. While I liked the former, Zootopia left me feeling as if all the characters had their arcs and that the story was “complete.” Every time I watch Wreck-It Ralph, I want to see more from these characters. I want Vanellope and Ralph to go on adventures in other games, I want to see the adventures of now-married Felix and Calhoun; the characters are fleshed-out, real, but above all live in such an imaginative world. Ever since I’ve seen the film, I have wanted to play Sugar Rush! I have plated Fix-It Felix on Disney’s site!

As someone that loves to draw and be inspired by visual wonderment, Wreck-It Ralph has honestly some of the most fleshed out world-building of any film I’ve seen -- and it’s in multiple worlds! Yeah, there’s a Rhianna song in there that keeps it from perhaps being “timeless,” but that’s it. The rest of the film is a love letter to gaming, to classic storytelling, and despite it being so modern, it has this old-school “charm” in its characters that I just love. Easily my favorite “New Disney” film. 

2. Beauty and the Beast:

This movie was my #1 for a LONG time, and it still is, in a lot of ways, my favorite Disney film. I was in love with this movie from the moment it came out -- Belle has always been my favorite female character in Disney and one that this bookworm could relate to as a kid SO much and looked up to!

The animation is some of the best in the Disney filmography and the story is just so simple, and yet perfect, from start to finish. It’s a movie I can turn on over and over again and enjoy on a rainy day. The music? Perfect, from start to finish. It’s as if the perfect score of The Lion King melded with the perfect sing-a-long capability of The Little Mermaid. The story? A much better adaptation of the original, in my opinion. The characters? They are some of the most fun and distinct in the entire Disney canon as well! It’s simply perfect. 

So...why is it that Beauty and the Beast is #2? Well, the live action remake can take a tiny chunk of the blame, pointing out some inconsistencies that after watching the live action make more pronounced, you can’t quite ignore in the original -- like how did the village not know this entire kingdom didn’t exist? -- but honestly, that’s super nitpicky!

The main reason is why this is #2 and #1 is ...

1. Aladdin:

...is Legacy. Beauty and the Beast is a perfect film in itself. But that’s it. Every time Disney has tried to create a sequel or spin-off...it just doesn’t work, because it’s such a self-contained small story.

Aladdin, though, rose to #1 on this list for a lot of combined reasons, but one of them is that these characters can go beyond the original movie and it still be good. The sequels, while flawed, still work and the television show that spun-off was a success as well.

But besides that, re-watching Aladdin as an adult is just more and more rewarding each time I go back to it. The humor that Robin Williams, and only Robin Williams can provide, is more funny to me now than ever. The animation, like Beauty and the Beast -- is FLAWLESS. This film may actually be better and more richly animated than Beauty and the Beast, and that is saying something!

The characters? SO fleshed out, real, fun, dynamic -- while some can complain that Belle is a Mary Sue, or that Gaston is a one-note villain -- you can’t say that about these characters! They are so three-dimensional and relatable, from both sides of the protagonist-antagonist roster. The music? Much like Beauty and the Beast, the score and songs are so iconic and catchy -- the story, too, borrows from classic fairy tales, but is adapted so cleverly and well here! When audiences now think of Arabian Nights -- we often think of this movie, and not the original tale -- which can’t be said for other movies such as The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty.

For a long time, Beauty and the Beast has been my #1, but the more I think about it, Aladdin just fills that slot so well. It’s probably why I’m terrified of a live action remake....the tone, cast, and pretty much everything about this film is perfect....Disney, it’s not broke. You don’t have to fix this.

[ikkydikky]

Here it comes! Time for an end of the year “Here’s what I drew this year” list. Mainly just to archive my art now for future’s sake and tell myself my thought process and how I felt about it now.

I’m skipping over sketches and going straight to stuff that was finished and polished and I’ll explain each image as we go. Buckle up boys its going to be a long one. 

We’re going to go to the first image I did this year and explain how things went from there!

Drawing #1, Scrubbed off Katia Managan 

March 3rd 2017

Art is actually kind of hard when you don’t know what form, line consistency, anatomy, or any of those things are! In fact I only know about two of them right now! And how to put into practice one of them! This image shows what its really like to start out with base-nothing. The idea is cute! And I’ll probably redo it later on when I am probably a years worth better. It marks however the first thing I really posted online. To me, that makes it special.

Drawing #2, Sigrid, but smug.

September 9th, 2017

BIG gap between the two! And not a lot of improvement, or maybe a lot of improvement? Who knows. I think this image was the first thing I did digitally that I put up for other people to see, and it was exciting! There’s absolutely no construction to this. Prior to this image being done I was basically drawing people’s heads and circles. Like, pages upon pages of circle grinding to actually know how to draw a circle digitally.

The main reason why there was such a gap between March and September was due to me graduating high school. I basically didn’t feel like drawing at all when I already had the work load of school ontop of me. But the art starts coming a lot faster now. Yes you can see there was a huge prequel influence. 

Drawing #3, Blushin Bob

September 29th, 2017

Art is something that you can really do a lot of, but you can easily get burnt out on. Animal crossing is actually one of my favorite games out there, and to try to pay tribute I drew this. Not uh, not exactly my favorite. 

This image has me trying basically 3 new things I’ve never done before. Shading, clothes, fur tufts, and bodies. Yeah. Not exactly my best job at any of those. The shadows are, very inconsistent and its clear I didn’t really know how to do it properly. The fur is atrocious with it looking like spiked tumors, and the shirt rides up way too high like hes wearing a shirt thats way too short! Also he might be a bit too skinny. 

This is kind of an image that broke me. At the time I was trying to fix every error when I just couldn’t, from the arm in the first attempt being god awful, to how the shading and shirt looks. I genuinely think this is the worst image in my library, and I knew it at the time since I drew nothing for all of October. You know. The month that’s meant to be the most inspiring artistically?

Drawing #4, Gondola The Peaceful Giant

November 12th, 2017

This was actually just a shitty paint up I did of a sketch practicing perspective. It was mainly for a draw thread on 8chan’s /v/ and probably my only work I’ve posted to an image board. I think generally doing art for anonymous people is a bit thankless. Its great for practicing but it really gives back no validation.

Keep in your memory these clouds, I’ll be talking about those later. 

Drawing #5, Bunny, The space mechanic.

November 12th, 2017

This character was a mistake, not the drawing but the character! This is my first actual tabletop character and boy I flubbed it. But this is art retrospective. Not roleplay retrospective. Anyway. A portrait done with a new pen style that I don’t think worked out too well. It comes off a bit too rough and gritty. But it makes for unique coloring when it comes to painting. I’ll actually have some more to say about that in a bit too! This also marks the point where I really got into drawing again. See. The table top group I’m in rewards you for drawing pictures of your characters, no matter how shitty it is, as long as you do your best, you get a reward in game. Its actually a really, really neat system!

Drawing #6, Oh dear god why.

November 16th, 2017

This is going to be a reoccurring character, so. Lets get to talking about it here. This character was as far as I know, a joke character made by a friend that got turned into a full blown character for a campaign, she is nonsensical, random, actually crazy, and worst of all, vibrantly colored. She is the Deviant Art Sparkledog as a character. Which funny enough, is her character name. This was my first attempt at really going ‘sexy’ and ‘nude’. And actually I think Sparkledog is a perfect candidate for it because its already cringy and god awful to look at! So it hides my bad attempts at a sexy lady behind an already cringy character. Thanks friend.

Anyway to talk about the art its self. It was done with no ref or pose. And I think it kind of shows. Everything’s proportionate to a degree but something about the perspective of the whole thing feels... off. Of course the background is just slapped together with glue but I mean on the character. She’s laying on the ground but not in a way that I think is possible or comfortable.

This also goes as my second attempt at fur, it’s, better. But definitely not good. Ontop of that this is probably my first attempt at an actual muzzle! Pic below related.

Muzzles are really hard to do. For some reason. If you ever read Loomis’ Fun with a Pencil it becomes slightly easier, but it also kind of isn’t. A month later and I still struggle with them, A lot of my joke sketches I often forgo any sort of attempt at drawing a muzzle and go for round head shapes, this works out if the character’s species is a prey type, as the eyes for herbivores are often on the side of the head, while for predators, its facing dead ahead. On another note, apparently I can just *do legs* with almost ease. I’ll touch on this more in a bit.

Drawing #7, A background for the end.

December 2nd, 2017

Tabletop is a wonderful thing, art groups are also an amazing experience to ever be apart of. The group I’ve been with has been an amazing experience for me artistically as I’ve learned to grow so much more. This is an image I did as soon as I woke up on my birthday. Friend A. did the character sketch. Friend b. did the coloring of the characters, and I got to practice something that I’ve wanted to do for ages.

Environmental art.

Ontop of character art and such, one thing that always draws my attention is environment art. Its something you can always get lost in. Your eyes can search to every corner imagining what it would be like to be there. Genuinely amazing works of art is often environment art. 

Its also time we talk about the clouds. I hope you remembered them from the gondola picture. See. Clouds are all about layers, and layers, and layers. Especially when done in a thunder storm. They’re something I might recommend painting if you ever want to start out! I do however think the clouds in the gondola image work a lot better. But I think that might be from the several things I did to trick myself to think they look better.

 And that’s all there really is to say on this image. Which is a problem. I learned a bit more about perspective and how floors work when under character’s feet... and how to do lightning kind of. But there isn’t much else. If I were to do this more I’d probably add another cliff to the background. A mountain, a landscape just beyond the fog, because it seems unfinished as it stands. 

Drawing #8, Oh dear god why, Revengeance.

December 5th? 2017

Probably the only unfinished image that gets posted! So lets talk about it. I think fur is my least favorite detail to make ever.Yet it also is my favorite when its done. The tail also might not be the best but its league’s better than my first attempt! But lets talk about the main thing about this image.

PAWS.

I don’t have a thing for paws, or feet, that’s not my kink. I think footjobs are sort of appealing sure but I don’t care much for it. so this was my first attempt at paws, and I think I did damn well. However, digitigrade legs are something I still have an issue with, and I am working towards fixing that. I don’t think furry characters look great when their legs are humans, but with paws. As well I think legs are the easiest part of the body to draw in some ways, that might just be me.

The face also is a bit of a mistake? Its better than its.. original incarnation...

[NOT EVEN THE DEAD KNOW PEACE FROM THIS EVIL]

Animal faces with human features is the proper way to do things, but human faces with animal features is... Hell incarnate.

Also that ass took me like 30 tries to get right god damn. 

Drawing #9, The last hoot for today.

December 18th, 2017

The last one for today. Some point after Christmas I’ll post probably another three drawings. But this is the final one. Lets talk about a few things about myself.

Art style is all about inspiration. You pick up inspiration from everywhere. Specifically from art styles you really, genuinely enjoy. You might have noticed the art style at first was I Wanna Be The Kazerad and then to something completely different from Kazerad but not distinct from anyone else. This is the process I think to finding your own art style. Emulation.

You might also noticed I ditched aliased (pixely) lines in favor of smooth lines, this was because I was having a tiny issue with drawing at large scale. For some reason I always liked zooming in real close on my 2000x2000 canvas and drawing tiny little things. The bunny picture is a really good example of this. He only took up the tiny corner of my much, much larger canvas. Speaking of his part of this post, lets get into color.

There’s been 3 ways I colored things, the first was plain flats, second was with a sort of homemade crayon brush (Ala Bunny and Gondola), and third was a unique way in how I did the eyes of this image. Looking at them closer you can see theres, actually a lot of rich detail in them!

This was a pretty easy thing to do and it has such amazing results that, I want to do a full image using it just to try it. For how I did it, I use krita, and how it handles gigantic brushes is like most art programs, by automatically raising the spacing between each ‘use’ (for a lack of a better term.)

Here’s what the blue part looks like with a white background behind it and the layer count to make this beside it. (Only one of them visible.)

It also kind of hits close to to another artist I’ve been following pretty closely as of lately. (And more recently on tumblr.)

You might not have heard of @jamdrawers , and you should definitely check them out if you haven’t. They are someone who, in my eyes, has such a wonderful art style. Other artists that do a style with pixelly, aliased lines don’t even come close in my opinion. I bring jam up here because of a few things, the art style he presents has thoroughly inspired me to pick back up trying to draw in aliased lines again, and because going forward I’ll continue looking to him for inspiration. Also if you read this jam tell winrarphile I said thanks for getting me into your art. 

Now, when it comes to the owl its self. I regret not adding a thicker outline to all of her character, and instead kept it to just the head shape, as well I do think she comes out a bit bland. Of course color wise its to keep in theme with the rest of the table top groups color theme. But outline wise? Definitely needs work. I tried a ‘hair style’ for her but that didn’t really work out either. So I kept it to the three feathers at the top of the head. I also think I spent more time on this image than I did any other, to quote myself “I’ll finish this owl up in about an hour or two”, which quickly lead to 8 days instead, just through procrastination.

Don’t do something in art if you really don’t want to do it. You can easily, easily get fatigued and burnt out with out delay, but among this procrastination came other sketches that, I don’t think I’ll post here, but helped me learn hands somewhat. So there is that.

Thus ends this posts governing topic. If you read this whole thing, good job. If you didn’t and skimmed to the end. That’s fine too! I understand I got a bit wordy but, I genuinely wanted to lay out my thoughts about all this.

In conclusion, I think the rate at which I’m getting better is decent, Mistakes are being ironed out each new drawing I take on. Each study and figure drawing adds onto the many experiences I’ll use for later in my artistic career, and I think the rate at which I’m drawing is far too slow for my own tastes, as such its a goal for the upcoming year to get a lot faster with finishing each drawing so I can quickly move onto the next. Thank you for reading this.

Have a noid chewin’ some pizza as a reward for coming down to the end.

[avenger-hawk]

I don’t understand the whole “I believe in you!“ bullshit in shounen. What exactly do they believe in? I understand believing that a person is trying their best or that they would never lie to you and so on. But in shounen it’s always about “believing that somebody is going to win!”. Which. What? Do they believe that this person is strong? Strong people lose, too. There are so many factors in a fight that even a rookie with a kitchen knife could kill an Iai Master. Hell, that Iai Master could(1)

just fall down and brain himself, no rookie needed. Do they believe that they’re determined? Determined people lose, too. Actually they lose all the time. Generally speaking in a fight most people are at least determined to survive, soo…. What the hell do they believe in? Believing in the fact that the enemy is a softie that doesn’t kill people makes more sense at this point. (2) 

Shounen are too simplistic, yes, but if you take fiction at face value you’ll fail to see the big picture and the underlying motives behind it. Not to mention you’ll miss the whole point of fiction.

(rants below the cut. some anti-ending mentions)

It’s a dangerous thing, to apply real life standards to fiction, because despite some may see it as some sort of modern critical thinking, it’s actually an aspect of the opposite, since critical thinking means being able to separate fiction from reality, and find out what kind of standards can be applied to it instead. Besides they’re different, they’re like parallel worlds where some things are the same, but not others.

Real fights are real, there are a lot of variables, you’re right about that. Fiction is fiction though, it doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to be plausible, enjoyable, well written, capable of stirring interest and emotions.  

Speaking of Iai, in manga it’s extremely exaggerated, almost turned into a superhero-like thing, just like every martial art, every sport, every single thing the manga is about. Manga is about making things sensational and cool. Competitions are super long in manga, in real life they’re short, especially martial arts, shouldn’t this be respected as well, according to your assumption? But then wouldn’t the scene be not as interesting?

Shouen aren’t realistic, shoujo and seinen and other genres aren’t realistic either, but maybe since they don’t have the whole determination/teamwork thing you might like them better. Personally I find shoujo cheesy and seinen cynical and drawn with a style I dislike, so despite I find shounen predictable and simplistic mostly, I still like them better.  

Shounen follow certain narratives and tropes. Teamwork, bonds, friendship, hard work are always important (even though the main character eventually gets a ton of power ups because he’s the chosen one). Another basic characteristic of shounen is the main character’s determination, believing in one’s own “ninja way” (or whatever other manga call it). Sometimes the battle is literally between opponents’ determination, take Naruto and Sasuke, even though Sasuke’s ideals were much more developed, just like his solution to make a better world, he was in the wrong side so Naruto won, even though he had no real plan on how to change things. This makes me furious, just like a lot of other things about  the manga, but when it’s Naruto against a random villain I don’t care if it’s illogical or if the villain is stronger, because I know that in shounen determination and bonds always win, simply put. 

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, if well written, or just if it happens after an interesting arc, with developed characters, because unrealistic fight aside, besides fans who are only into fights and powers, most readers are interested in a good plotline overall with memorable moments and interactions, so they’re more likely to suspend their disbelief. Also, fights often show the power of friendship and the characters’ determination, and they are a pretext for interesting interactions between characters.

For example, I liked the manga/anime Gensoumaden Saiyuki where fights were meh, even the plotline was nothing much, but the whole focus was on characters, their interactions and their bond. I hated the Kaguya arc, both because Madara was much better than her as a villain and because it was dumb how invincible she was at first, compared to how she was defeated with that one move by the reunited Team7. But the interactions between Sasuke and N*ruto were interesting, just like Obito and Kakashi’s. I liked how Kakashi was willing to die to shield Sasuke, I was moved by Obito’s death, I also found funny that Naruto used Reverse Harem Jutsu despite it obviously woudn’t have worked. But it wasn’t just for the laughs. It was also a pretext to show N*ruto and Sasuke’s teamwork; it was a pretext to show that Sasuke was willing to go on with N*ruto’s plan even though he had a plan on his own, for example. It highlighted Sasuke’s adaptability, whether kishi did it on purpose or not. 

I HATE kishi for what he did with the ending, so defending him is the last thing I would do. But as much as I hate the ending and I hate its many inconsistencies and plotholes and no solving of the system’s flaws, those you mentioned aren’t what angered me. (I have a whole anti-ending tag and I don’t want to repeat this tho)

There is also a cultural reason. Different cultures prefer different tropes. American fictions are often about “self-made men” who start with nothing and achieve success through hard work, or action heroes/heroines who save the world by themselves, which shows the country’s individualistic mentality. In my country stories are often about charming/funny scoundrels who end up helping those in need while outsmarting/defeating the law, which shows an admiration for cunning instead of hard work, and a mistrust of authorities. Shounen, a part of Japanese culture, value hard work, the importance of teamwork and determination to do one’s best to protect the group, because they’re a collective based culture. Also, in my opinion, shounen in particular also serve a purpose, a sort of propaganda to suggest kids how to behave in society, like, work hard, group first, little individual quirks are ok as long as you’re acting for the right group (see N*ruto’s fake ninja way that seems original at first but actually he’s just bypassing some minor rules but still acting inside the system). Conspiracy-ish theory ended. 

Cultures aside, looking at it from an even higher perspective, it’s a typical archetype of mythologies all over the world, that a seemingly weaker character defeats a stronger one. It’s something all humans have in themselves, subconsciously, to be able to defeat something bigger than them, no matter how illogical and unrealistic it is. 

[twocoinarchive-blog]

there are very few things i like about the n52 comics about harvey, and those things are, unfortunately, so easily overshadowed by the many things i loathe about the entire reboot

i like how we get a bit more insight about harvey’s relationship w/ gilda ( even if ! i’m disappointed by the fact that the writers forgot she’s a sculptor ,, rip ), and i like that they established ! that he has been bruce’s friend for a long time ( since pre - school, maybe even before, according to ba.tman and ro.bin : the big burn ) which is a stark contrast to new earth’s the long halloween where harvey and bruce only became acquaintances, barely even friends, and with harvey still showing disdain towards bruce

i do like that he’s been shown to be more, dare i say it, vain ( and a tad bit more selfish ) compared to his new earth counterpart, and while new earth will forever be my favorite version, it’s a fresh take on his character that i can enjoy

what easily overshadows this is, however, the poor backstory he was given. i can respect the writer’s making him striving towards, and becoming, a DEFENSE ATTORNEY ( at first, he later chooses to turn to the prosecutor route ), but they’ve done so in a poor way by making his entire character be spoiled by one, single thing — by making him a mob lawyer for the mckil.len twins. we’re speaking about harvey de.nt here, yall, harvey ‘ everyone who participates in mob business are immediately deemed as corrupt and almost just as bad as the criminals themselves, for they had a choice in whether they wanted to defend them or not ’ de.nt. i want yall to sit on that for a second. they took everything that had been established about harvey, a fair man whose sense of justice was immaculate and who breathed to put every criminal in goth.am behind bars, and made him into someone who worked for the mob. not even just the mob, but the WORST of the mob in the n52 universe.

couple this fact with the knowledge that n52 made harvey de.nt, not just two - fa.ce, but harvey de.nt into quite the asshole early on, really doesn’t sit well with the Morally Good and Ethically So - So Clean character we have been introduced to in new earth, and despite the fact he refuses to deal with the mck.illens later on, this is just one big mix for a character that, when boiled down, is really just Asshole Lawyer who Got Punished By His Former Clients. he really is an asshole in this continuity, though. a damn shame. i don’t personally want to read about an asshole lawyer, that’s not what i signed up for when i decided to dedicate myself to this character

anyways let me go back to the topic at hand, because while i do adore the relationships that has been established in this continuity, there are some instances where it really just brought a frown to my face. let me take as an instance: 

his relationship with bruce seems to be build up more around the fact that harvey wishes to be more like him. these comics makes it seem like harvey is actively jealous of bruce’s life style and wishes to be more suave and charming, which contradicts his being in new earth, where it seems like he’s decently happy with his current way of life. 

and

his relationship with jim gordon is nothing less but strained in this continuity. jim is shown as, get a load of this, quite the CORRUPT cop, which as well all know he truly isn’t in the older comics. but due to this we can see that jim ( along with bruce and gilda ) to drop some of his ethics, ethics that he still value in this run ( thank god ), in favor of making everything easier. it’s a bit dirty, isn’t it ? it doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t fit their new earth relationship, which had been shown to be good and honest ( before the courtroom accident ). also, he tried to encourage harvey to basically spill anything he had on the mckill.ens ( thus effectively violating the attorney / client privilege ) which, if found out, would absolutely damage not only harvey’s reputation, but his entire career, and i don’t know about you all, but that doesn’t sound very cop like of someone, especially not someone who, in prior continuities, harvey was able to place his trust upon. of course he might be trying to pressure harvey into spilling secrets because said mobsters had tried to assassinate the entire gordon family, but my point still stands.

of course i could spend another whole week ranting on about how upset i am about them killing off gilda. “would you die for harvey, mrs. dent ?” erin mcki.llen asks after breaking out a jail, and when gilda answers yes, she stabs her. anticlimatic, but not surprising, and yet it still stings. but this really just gives harvey the one motivation to become Angry and Resentful™ ( something that he has not shown to be before in n52 due to a lack of a tragic backstory alá. abusive dad, or a lack for a backstory at all ) that every other male character has by now in n52 — angst and a motivation for revenge because they fridged the most important character in his life. it’s a trope we’ve seen a billion times before and let me be honest here : i don’t like it. to think that this is the premise they’ve set up in order for him to become two - fa.ce ! the one thing i DO like about this is the ending of this particular comic arc ( the one where gilda dies ). it’s heartwrenching and despite my dislike for the comic in general, it make me choke up a little. that despite his anger and need for revenge, his first priority still lays with gilda, even if she has turned to death, and sorrow and regret begins to worm its way into his character. it’s amazing how much of a vital part of his character she was established as in n52 ( compared to the new earth version, which quickly got boiled down to her simply being a housewife )

ANYWAYS

what makes this even more funny to me, this whole n52 deal, is that there’s no downright reason for him to be so heavily dependent on The Coin as he is. there’s not anything spectacular, it’s not his dad’s old trick coin that was used in a sick nightly game, it’s not the lucky coin of a certain mr. maroni — no, what it is is but a single, coincidentalcoin that happens to have two heads which he had in a coin collection. that’s it. that’s literally it. i’m so confused as to WHY he decided to later on revolve his entire crime career around this silly little piece of silver. at no point in there entire run of n52 pre - tw.o - face harvey do we even SEE him dabble on the topic of chance and fate and duality. there’s no signs of prior mental illness either, everything pointing towards that the actual trauma of getting acid poured on his face and seeing his wife die within a matter of hours being the Culprit towards him developing schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder — which is a bullshit reasoning. the origin arc we are introduced to in The Big Burn falls completely flat as an origin story for tw.o - face, however, i must admit, it’s a huge leap as a story for harvey de.nt, despite its MANY flaws.

i don’t agree with many of the other works in n52 either.

however, i admit i am a sucker for the all - star batm.an story, My Own Worst Enemy. it gives a lovely little explanation for the inconsistencies in harvey’s and tw.o - face’s character throughout the years, and while her certainly is rather sadistic with literally no moral compass at all, something that doesn’t feel right, i can agree with a majority of everything delivered, even if it hits home a tad bit too hard with the fact that it’s revealed that harvey’s about ready to give up on life and fully willingly to let tw.o - face take control once and for all, a rather obvious sign of him not only being severely depressed, but also suicidal ( may i remind yall that he has quite literally shot himself in the head. he’s one lucky — i’m saying lucky loosely here — son of a gun ). if i may say it, it’s a part that hits a lil bit close to home

long story short n52 is still shit, i only read it for harvey and for the art, and for the fact that i rlly want to icon these Crisp n Clean panels

thanks for coming to my ted talk 

[t-oresama]

"Ouran High School Host Club" volumes 1-18 by Bisco Hatori

Synopsis: In this screwball romantic comedy, Haruhi, a poor girl at a rich kids' school, is forced to repay an $80,000 debt by working for the school's swankiest, all-male club-- as a boy! There she discovers just how wealthy all six members are and how different the rich are from everybody else...

Published: 2002-2010 (Hakusensha/ LaLa Magazine [JPN], Viz Media [USA] Genre: Manga, Romantic-Comedy, Slice-of-Life, Parody Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Reader Review: It has been nearly a year (or so) since I've done a review. Half of the reason for this is because I've been too busy to be reading much of anything. The other half of the reason is because I've been reading (pretty much) nothing but this series. I don't remember how I was first introduced to the manga series, but it was years ago and probably came to know about it from knowing the anime. Because, let's be honest, every anime originated from some sort of manga. My best friend and I were looking for something to watch one night way back in 2011 (as I said, years ago), and stumbled upon the "Ouran High School Host Club" show. We binge-watched it over the course of a week and loved its humor and the way it constantly broke the 4th wall and parodied many a played-out trope of manga/anime/otaku culture. It must have been from there that I found out it was a manga and started to chip away at it. 7 years later... I only had volumes 1-10 in my possession and I must have only read half of them. Meanwhile, work, life, other books etc, took precedence and Ouran the manga sat on my bookshelf. For the incoming new year, I decided to (try not to) buy any new books and read the ones I had first, starting with the entire Ouran manga series. And finally, I’ve finished.

Let me just say now that I'm going to get very nerdy with this review and talk about things apropos of nothing. And let me also say that, although I love the Ouran TV series, 26 episodes are not enough to do the whole manga story justice. Much like FullMetal Alchemist, Inuyasha, and so on, the manga was an ongoing publication when the idea to turn it into a TV series came about. But the need to have it made into a TV series outweighed the patience to wait for the manga to end, thus the show got a new, original ending, completely separate from how the manga ended. In fact, the manga wouldn’t get its ending until FOUR YEARS after the anime ended. Because of this, a lot of creative liberties were taken for the second half of the show. It's something I both understand and hate about anime adaptations. Like, there wouldn't have been a "FullMetal Alchemist Brotherhood" if the anime creators just let the manga creator finish her series, and then we'd only have one FullMetal Alchemist anime series to save all the confusion. Long story short, the Ouran manga series has so much packed into it, that a lot of the things alluded at in the anime series (Tamaki's relationship with his family, Hikaru's feelings for Haruhi, and so on) make so much more sense now. It really makes me want to re-watch the anime to look out for those subtle nuances portrayed in the manga. ***I will add that there is a live-action TV series and movie for the Ouran series that does take place while the manga was further along than when the anime series was made, but both series were made while the manga was ongoing. Anyway, the manga series itself is a visual feast. It switches up art styles so many times, mostly to show the zany/funny parts, with a consistent, beautiful art style for the more serious parts. You could read the whole manga series in Japanese and still get the gist of the story based on the illustrated panels alone. The dialogue is also equally sharp, with the same ability to go back and forth between a funny moment and a serious moment without the tonal changes being too jarring for the reader. It's a testament to Hatori's storytelling ability that such transitions happen pretty frequently, yet instead of feeling inconsistent or sloppy, the comedic moments hit you that much harder because of how well-timed they're delivered. Better yet, Hatori creates this world of flip-floppy wacky-serious moments and makes you believe that, in this world, such back and forths are totally normal. The dialogue between characters itself feels organic despite some of the topics being absolute nonsense (after all, this series is mostly about boys who are stupid rich and mistake middle-class living for living in poverty), but it adds to the characterization of the Host Club boys (and girl). The characters, much like the situation, are caricatures of tropes long unironically portrayed in mangas that have come before it. Tamaki is the darling charmer who knows just the right mushy thing to say to make the ladies swoon, Mori is the ridiculously strong and stoic type, Hunny is the cavity-inducing cute boy who likes sweets and bunnies and everything pure in the world, etc. And the character of Haruhi, while of course having her own personality, works for the reader as one that the reader can insert themselves into, as she sees the absurdity of the rest of the boys, and the workings of the rich in general, that no one else in the school sees, and reacts accordingly. It makes the reader's transition into this fanciful world easier thanks to Haruhi acting as the bridge between the two. If not for her, the goal of understanding this world, rather than taking it seriously, because it really isn't a series to take all that seriously, would be much harder to do. The cohesion of the main story itself is consistent. This is a series based in romance, after all, and at one point, there is a love square with Haruhi as the object of three boys' affections. While the main story is going on, we get side stories and inside looks into the lives of the Host Club members, which allow for us to get a better understanding of who each of the characters are and why they are the way they are. There's world-building in conjunction with story-building, and that makes for a more well-rounded story. By the last volume, the main story really picks up, but it's also the volume that let me down the most just because of how rushed things felt (despite the last volume actually being the thickest). The main romantic plot is comes to fruition, but the slow build that has been happening since volume 1 becomes a jump from present-day to three months in the future to eight months in the future in volume 17. Don't get me wrong, I loved the little future bits, but it didn't flow with me as well as the rest of the series. Oh, and the ending. I won't spoil much of it, but you really really really have to bear in mind that this is a series of nonsense and that anything can happen because most of the characters are rich enough to make that happen. Despite all of that, the ending, which I can best describe as a "tie it all up in a nice neat bow" happy ending, asks a lot of the reader to accept. It doesn't really provide the characters with the obstacles that I'd hoped for (in the same way that Hunny and Mori graduating high school didn't provide the situation of the Host Club going on without two members in the way I'd expected). If I could just have one more volume to develop the story and relationships just a bit more between the present day and the eight months in the future we’re left off at, I would in a heartbeat. It wasn't that I was dissatisfied, quite the opposite, but more just that I feel there's unexplored opportunity that would've really done justice to the pace and world-building of the rest of the series. With the completion of this manga series, Ouran High School Host Club goes up there as one of my favorites series. Its re-readability is way up there, and its comedic tone is unmatched even today.As Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” is a parody of Gothic tropes, “Ouran High School Host Club” is a parody of romantic tropes in manga, and if you like humor in your romantic shojo mangas, this is quintessential for you. The series also succeeds in helping me overcome a huge hurdle as the Haruhi/Hikaru shipper I came in as reading this: it made me not only understand, but like Haruhi and Tamaki as a couple. That alone makes it worth the read, and re-read.

[EDIT: Tumblr is apparently a money-hungry schmuck ever since they partnered with Yahoo, and because I used “Ouran High School Host Club” as a tag, they put a Yahoo advertisement on my post like ?????? That’s just icky. Since I’m obviously not going to remove the tag, I just want to say please  DON’T CLICK THE LINK BELOW THAT TUMBLR/YAHOO IS FORCING ON MY OWN PERSONAL POST. I DON’T APPROVE OF IT BEING THERE. Man, Tumblr’s really hit a new low... Anyway, thanks for reading <3 ]

[gman-003]

Aesthetics - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword analyzed, Part Five

(This is part of my ongoing series analyzing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, part of a bigger series where I play through and then talk excessively about every game in the Zelda series. If you want to catch up, earlier installments discussed the use of patterns, the story and how it fits into the chronology, the controls, and the flow and friction)

Video games are composite art. They combine dozens of artistic (and non-artistic) disciplines. You have game designers, writers, musicians, and an entire array of visual artists, specializing in textures, models, animation, lighting, and all kinds of other things. I've been focusing a lot on the game design, since that's an understudied field, but all the other elements deserve analysis too. We've already examined the story, so today, we'll take a look at the look of Skyward Sword.

Good: Overall art direction, graphics

When I review games, I make a distinction between "art" and "graphics". The former, as I use the term, is the timeless quality of the art direction, divorced from that specific implementation in the game; the latter is the technical work of making the software turn the artistic vision into reality, judged by what the hardware can theoretically handle. "Art" is that which shows up even in the manual and advertising, that which is unchanged in remakes and ports. Skyward Sword, on the whole, does an excellent job on both fronts.

The graphics are nothing to write home about by 2017 standards, but for a Wii game, it looks excellent. It's important to remember just how weak the Wii was, even compared to the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. It also has some real limitations on what you can do with it, beyond just strength - since the processor design was identical to the Gamecube, it had very little flexibility, requiring a lot of trickery from programmers to get many special effects.

I'm not really equipped to dig into the technical functioning of it, but just from playing, it seems to hold a mostly-stable 30fps, rendering the game at 360p and upscaling to 480p before rendering UI elements. This is a common trick for console games - this hides the jaggies you get with no antialiasing, and fonts benefit far more from the increased resolution than the 3D environment does, while not costing nearly so much processing time to render. There was some consistent framerate drops during certain cutscenes - most scenes of a Timeshift Stone have some really nasty reduction in framerate - but during gameplay, it seems to be solid, which is when it really matters.

Some very interesting effect is done to create a depth-of-field-like effect, blurring the far background in a painting-like way. Again, I don't have the tools (or, quite frankly, the skills and time) to dig into exactly how this is done, but the effect is really well-done. This serves a gameplay purpose too, by making foreground objects (like enemies or items) stand out more from the background.

The design of most of the characters is also spot-on. Everything is stylized, anatomy is often exaggerated, and colors are bright and vibrant. There's visual depth to everything, lots of layers, which balances out the flatter colors. Faces are expressive. Costumes are iconic without being overly simple.

Even lots of the fully background characters look pretty good. Wander through Skyloft, and you'll see lots of interesting characters. There are very few background characters with a bland or boring design.

Okay: The Heroes

Which makes it so weird that the two central characters of the game are so dull. Skyward Sword's Link and Zelda aren't bad, really. They're just... completely unremarkable. 

Link is bland. He doesn't have any of that exaggerated styling that made other characters fun. He just looks like the Link from Twilight Princess with new textures. There's very little depth or layering - the dominant feature is just that blank green tunic. Given how much green there is in the environment, Link often fades into the background. This never reached the level of a gameplay issue, at least for me, but it's still not great when the player character isn't visually distinct from the game world, especially when the story is about him entering a strange new world.

Link also just doesn't fit in. His proportions are far more realistic than the rest, making him look out of place next to caricatures like Beedle or Strich or Gondo. It's not consistent - he looks fine beside Pipit or Kina or Peatrice - but that inconsistency is itself a minor problem.

Zelda's first design in the game is fine. It's got contrast, it's got depth, it's not the best thing ever but it's pretty good. And she's very well animated - I won't call it Pixar quality but it's leagues ahead of where they were even a few years prior. She's emotionally expressive and responsive. But then she has a costume change, and it's just... nothing.

It's a white dress. No other color. No layers. No depth. No frills or poofs or anything, besides a bit of lace designs that you can only see in the concept art. They still have her moving well but it's just... so... wasted. Could they really think of nothing more visually interesting than a featureless white dress to symbolize the purification stuff? You don't see her in this outfit all that much, but it's the outfit she's in for the majority of the game, so it's still very important. It wouldn't have taken much to make her design better. Give her any splash of color - a red rope belt (red string has a suitable symbolic meaning in east-asian culture), a purple feather from her Loftwing in her hair, anything really that isn't plain featureless white. Even making that lace rendition of the Hyrulian Royal Crest more visible would have worked. Even if you absolutely insisted on flat white, you could layer the clothing to give depth instead of a featureless white void. Or give her more to wear - a wimple or veil over her head even adds to that "purification" intent (and it's not like Zelda games haven't borrowed religious imagery before). I can't really point to anything that was actually done wrong with Link or Zelda. They just aren't nearly as good as many of the other characters.

Bad: The Villains

Some stuff was just outright bad, though.

Tentalus, the boss of the Sandship dungeon, is a bizarrely cartoonish enemy design. If its battle was intentionally funny, that could have worked - but the fight is framed as one of the most dramatic in the game. The ship shudders under its attack from the moment it appears, twisting in a section reminiscent of the Call of Duty 4 level "Crew Expendable", of all things. The skies are dark under the pouring rain, lit by distant lightning... the music builds to an ominous tension... as this Baby's First Lovecraftian Horror shows up. It's purple Cthulhu with tentacle dreadlocks. As more than one fan artist has noted, Tentalus looks like it came from a Monsters Inc. knockoff, not a Zelda game with a French Impressionist aesthetic.

And the single eye as a weak point, in this late stage of the game, is frankly unnecessary. Any player who's made it this far knows how boss weak points work. Absent a gameplay justification, it just further serves to make the boss look child-like.

For a boss that features so prominently in the game, The Imprisoned is also quite poorly designed. His core problem is his lack of features, and how the "gameplay-oriented" features look so out of place.

On the face of it, a dark behemoth, featureless except for a gaping maw, seems like a perfectly fine idea. The early concept art certainly looks good. But now add some white blobs as "toes" that serve as weak points - first, it distracts from that singular focus on the mouth, and second it undercuts the intimidating look of the boss, because seriously, you kill the boss by stabbing its toes? The same thing happens when, in the second and third forms, they added some ungainly long arms, tipped with white blobs as "fingers". They were certainly necessary to make the boss fight playable, but there had to have been another way to do it. It just reeks of a boss that was designed by an artist, and then had to have gameplay elements tacked on.

The Imprisoned also fits very poorly with the painterly aesthetic of the rest of the game. It, almost alone in the game, is harshly geometric, with his hundreds of identical scales. The concept art is quite a bit more abstract, so maybe it's a matter of the Wii not having the horsepower for all those particle effects. But I have to judge the game they released, not the game they wanted to make, and this game has a central villain that doesn't fit.

Had that felt more deliberate, it could have worked. The Twili had that sort of effect in Twilight Princess, with a techno-ish sound and harsh digital effects to play up their alien-ness to Hyrule. But in every way except its appearance, The Imprisoned fits the game normally - normal music, normal gameplay, normal sound effects.

Overall, the game's aesthetic sensibilities are on point. It really is a lovely game. But those few mistakes are all the more glaring when they're surrounded by excellence.

Next time: the greatest flaw of Skyward Sword

[theconservativebrief]

American cheese as we know it is dead, at least according to Bloomberg. The culprit, as always, is millennials. “One by one,” the story reads, “America’s food outlets are abandoning the century-old American staple. In many cases, they’re replacing it with fancier cheeses.”

The evidence is strong. Fast-food restaurants, once bastions of food-adjacent products, have been on a tear to replace their artificial ingredients with real ones. Last month, McDonald’s announced it would part ways with all artificial colorings and preservatives.

At Serious Eats, J. Kenji López-Alt defines American cheese as a “product made by blending real cheese with texture- and flavor-altering ingredients” to produce something that is similar to, but not the same as, the rennet-milk-salt combo we generally define as “cheese.” It is sliced, either at the manufacturer or off a block at the deli counter. It melts exceptionally well. But even the greatest feats of engineering cannot last forever.

US sales of processed cheeses like Kraft Singles — the fluorescent orange icon of American cheese — and Velveeta are expected to decline this year for the fourth year in a row. At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 500-pound barrels of cheddar used to make American cheese “are selling at a record discount” to purveyors who will instead cube them up and turn them into party platters.

Millennials, we know, are health-conscious and spend their spare time killing industries. That they are moving away from processed slices of orange cheese product is not surprising. At the same time, does not American cheese have merit in some way, if only as a testament to American ingenuity, and salt?

To help us process this news, I asked eight experts for their thoughts on the death of the processed cheese slice.

Andy Jacobi, owner of Untamed Sandwiches and Untamed Taqueria

I know people probably want to hear restaurateurs and chefs wax nostalgic about American cheese, but let’s be honest: American cheese is crap. There are so many great cheeses on the market right now. You can buy 10 varieties of Cabot at any Mobil mart on the I-95, and the worst variety of Cabot cheddar is still better than the best variety of American cheese. It might take a few seconds longer on the griddle to melt, but that’s because real cheese has texture and inconsistencies that make it taste so complex, which American cheese doesn’t have.

I think the best thing about foodie culture today is that restaurant customers are asking tough questions about the ingredients chefs use. Restaurants must dig deeper to find better ingredients raised by farmers and artisans that are passionate about producing something different, something of the highest possible quality. There is no better example than that of the incredibly skillful cheesemongers and dairy farmers all over the Northeast. You can call that millennials killing off foods that used to be popular; I call that progress.

Jared Male, chef and owner of Randall’s Barbecue

I grew up on American cheese, and there is something comforting about it to me. We actually made grilled cheese sandwiches for the Randall’s staff a couple nights ago. While other cheeses make good sandwiches, nothing compares to a grilled cheese with American. It’s also a key component for our mac and cheese sauce — I find it adds an extra level of gooeyness. I can’t see American cheese ever really being phased out, and I don’t know what could realistically replace it.

Tia Keenan, cheese specialist and author of Melt, Stretch, & Sizzle: The Art of Cooking Cheese

“Millennials Kill Again. The Latest Victim? American Cheese” is a misleading title, because what the article is about is millennials not wanting to eat processed, fake cheese anymore. They love real American cheese, which is made from milk, rennet, and salt. What they’re rejecting is processed cheese.

Cheese is very uncomplicated — the base recipe for cheese, no matter where in the world it’s made, is pretty much always the same. So when we say “American cheese” as a substitute for processed cheese, we’re conflating two different things. Processed cheese like Kraft Singles, which is what this article is talking about, are made from hydrogenated vegetable oil, and there are all kinds of ingredients in there that make it not cheese, which is why they’re actually not allowed to call Kraft Singles cheese, legally. They have to call it a cheese food product.

As someone who writes about cheese for a living, who talks to people about cheese for a living, and who has been doing that for a long time, I’m more than happy that millennials are saying, “We want real food made from real ingredients.” Besides rejecting the food itself, they’re also rejecting a sort of larger picture: the global food conglomerate. They’re rejecting not just the flavor of Kraft Singles, which is vile, but also the value system that makes Kraft Singles popular.

A victim of millennial tastes. MCT/Getty Images

Heidi Gibson, commander-in-cheese at the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen

I don’t like American cheese — I’ve always thought it was kind of gross, and I won’t serve food I’m not proud of. It just doesn’t seem like cheese to me; it’s too plasticky and chemical-y. We made an early decision to prioritize working with local producers and use high-quality all-natural products, preferably organic. We felt like American cheese just didn’t back up our brand positioning and our point of view about our food.

Yeah, American cheese melts well — meaning it melts a little faster — but I’ll put a grilled cheese made with Tillamook medium cheddar up against one made with American cheese any day and bet the farm on the Tillamook cheddar. Monterey Jack and creamy Havarti are also fantastic melting cheeses but can be a bit mild for some, so we like to combine those with smaller amounts of cheeses with a stronger flavor, like Italian-style fontina, goat cheese, a sharper cheddar, or even Gruyère.

Gio Osso, chef and owner of Virtu Honest Craft

I love American Cheese! I love all cheese — well, maybe we can leave out Velveeta, but I do love American cheese. I love making grilled cheese with it, I love it in omelets, on burgers, on a sandwich, but most of all, I love it on a tuna melt. I do prefer white American cheese, if that makes a difference. I sometimes put it in a classic lasagna Bolognese with prosciutto cotto. White American cheese gives it a silky, creamy texture.

Susan Feniger, co-chef and owner of Border Grill, TV host, and author of Susan Feniger’s Street Food

As a kid in Toledo, Ohio, my favorite thing to make with my mom was Velveeta Cheese Dreams [toast wrapped around Velveeta] with Taystee white bread. I absolutely loved making it with her — dipping, rolling, and freezing. Then when company came over, putting it under the broiler and wow, what a delicious dish.

Now my tastes have shifted quite a bit. There are so many really, really wonderful cheeses out there that aren’t loaded with most of [artificial] ingredients and that have a ton of flavor and melt really, really well. One of our favorite things to make is a delicious tomato soup with a grilled cheese, and unfortunately, I have to say we don’t make it with Velveeta. Demands and taste buds do change and will continue to. There was a time to buy all canned goods, freeze everything, and eat American cheese. Although I’m old, I agree with the millennials on this one.

The American cheeseburger: a case study. Press Herald/Getty Images

Gordon Edgar, cheesemonger and author of Cheddar: A Journey into the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese

The article is about a decline in the production and consumption of American cheese, but there are still hundreds of millions of pounds of it being made a year — it’s not like it’s an endangered species. Right now is actually an especially hard time for dairy farmers and small-production cheesemakers. They’re the ones who are really endangered! Talking about American cheese as if it’s going to go the way of the pterodactyl or whatever is a little funny, but I get it. It’s reflecting something that’s real, which is that there’s much more consumer desire for natural cheese as opposed to processed cheese these days.

When I started to research processed cheese, I realized it’s over 100 years old. It does have its own history and its own — I hesitate to say integrity, but it has a reason for being. It’s a way to sell things, by preserving the protein of milk even longer than traditional cheesemaking can. I’ll go philosophical here: If the purpose of cheese is to extend the life of milk, and you’re taking a protein and you’re making it last longer to ensure that your community or your farm or your family has something to eat down the road, processed cheese is an extension of that logic — though at the cost of flavor, the taste of an individual region, and small farms.

I won’t turn my nose up if I go someplace and they serve me a burger with processed cheese. I’m not going to freak out about it, but I don’t choose it. It just tastes artificial to me. But in many places in many regions, there’s kind of an affinity for it. You have your cheesesteak in Philly, your Provel in the Midwest, your queso dip in certain parts of the Southwest. There’s tradition around that, so I don’t want to totally dismiss it. Comfort food is important. And comforting.

Wylie Dufresne, chef and owner at Du’s Donuts

There are lots of things that are American that we should probably be ashamed of, but I think American cheese is a pretty awesome American invention. I like it on its own as a slice — I’ve had several slices today myself — but I also think it’s really good on a burger, in a grilled cheese. I like folding it into scrambled eggs at the last second; it gives them a nice cheesy consistency. One could argue, well, couldn’t you get that result with a nice soft Brie? And you certainly could, but it would be a slightly different flavor profile.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s the best type of cheese. Is it ever going to be as glorious as a Roquefort or whatever the best cheddar is? Probably not. But does it deserve its place in the diner? I think it most certainly does. And having it in your kitchen for the occasional slice mixed in with your pasta? You could do a lot worse.

Personally, I’m not a Velveeta guy. I also don’t like Kraft Singles, to be honest. Neither are my favorite version of American cheese. I like Land o’ Lakes a lot, and I really like Boar’s Head American cheese. If one can be a connoisseur of American cheese, then I might be considered that. It’s too bad that the millennials don’t like it. I’m sorry for them. I think they’re missing out! You have to be kind of a grouchy person to say “no, thank you” to American cheese.

Original Source -> Should we mourn the death of American cheese? 8 experts weigh in.

via The Conservative Brief