#and has failed utterly because everything outside of the line of sight of the core cast doesn't exist and clearly was never meant to exist

[kaelor0409]

Part of this can be explained by the fact that the first book is an adaptation of a fairy tale (Beauty and the Beast) and a myth (Eros and Psyche, which itself was a prototype for Beauty and the Beast).

Amaranthe hoodwinking all the High Lords out of their power makes very little sense when you think of them as the characters we meet later, but in ACOTAR it's the standard "Evil Queen steals power from rightful rulers, covers the land in darkness" thing that's in every fairy tale. The Evil Queen can only be defeated if her curse is broken by True Love, etc. These tropes are so ubiquitous an audience will immediately accept them without question...in a fairy tale.

Parents don't have names in fairy tales. Sisters rarely do either. No one has a last name, because why would it matter? The calendar is "what season is it?", and the economics of the wondrous shining city don't need to be questioned.

This is a totally legitimate way to do a story. The first Star Wars movie used it extensively: very little is explained and the explanations are mostly nonsense. Later media fleshed it out considerably, but the movie by itself runs almost entirely on trope logic.

The problem is that the later books try to pivot from fairy tale to classic fantasy, and fantasy has lore. If you introduce the political intrigue of feuding lords (a fantasy staple) the idea of the Evil Queen tricking the High Lords comes into question, because why would these selfish schemers ever agree or be tricked so easily? Fae like the Illyrians with defined biology, culture, and history (standard for a fantasy race) makes classic fairy tale fae feel out of place because they clearly don't have any of that. Something like a flushing toilet existing is fine for a fairy tale because they are inherently timeless and are mostly about vibes, but in fantasy that has Implications.

It should be noted that fantasy doesn't need deep world-building. Everyone thinks it does, because Tolkien had it and a lot of other fantasy greats followed his lead, but there are plenty of other notable fantasy stories that don't bother. You don't need a calendar or lineage chart or map of trade routes to have a good fantasy story, and in a lot of cases those will get in the way more than they will help. This is why ACOTAR still works as a series despite the fact that it is very clearly making stuff up as it goes along: the core plot doesn't need the missing details to work. You can still enjoy a play even if the backdrop is a black canvas and the props are recycled from last year's production, because those aren't what matter.

It does make the series less enjoyable though, and may be a deal breaker for people who can't turn off their brain enough to ignore the inconsistencies. It's also a nightmare for fanfic writers, because we know very little about the setting and what we do know doesn't make sense.

feeling rlly annoyed at sjm right now for her shitty worldbuilding

im trying to work on stuff for my acotar fic but theres so many problems im running into when it comes to canon

1- WHY IS THERE NO DATING SYSTEM?? WHAT YEAR IS IT? WHAT MONTH IS IT? this is one of the most basic aspects of creating a story. For example one of the first things i did with my friends when we created out story was make a dating system and explained its origin and shit.

2- why do the majority of characters lack surnames?? i get side characters but major ones like RHYSAND, Tamlin, Cassian, Azriel, and many more lack simple things such as surnames.

3- many characters just arent named. The archeron sisters father is not named. All of rhysand and tamlins family (who are talked about a decent amount) are nameless. Cassians mother is also nameless. The king of hybern is a MAJOR villain who goes unnamed.

4- also missing ages for lots of characters. annoying as fuck.

5- a very non descriptive time period to reference. There’s electricity? theres baths? but its also strangely archaic. Characters dress a bit old fashion but also like its 2016? theres no reference for time period at all.

6- A lack of explanation for the economy. Specifically VELARIS. I have no idea how velaris as a city works. From what i can tell theres no way it can be as good as it is due to what we are told about the city. It was hidden for years but it was able to survive? what about trade? government? homelessness and poverty are said to be non existence but how?? Rhysand is said to be extremely wealthy but how?? Tamlin was villainized for having his people pay taxes (which werent even severe ones??) but rhysand somehow has a city running ‘perfectly’ while also building his like 3rd or 4th house.

these are just off the top of my head too. Sjm when i catch you

[iturbide]

the fact that edelgard is the villain in 3/4 routes and yet intsys STILL glorifies her to no end enrages and annoys me. no other villain has been given that perspective of “well actually maybe they arent so bad” except for the hypocritical tyrant. even when she has *literally become an inhuman monster* intsys is still like “oh no dont worry she was right actually!” and it upsets me deeply

It upsets me, too, friend.  IntSys seems to really like glorifying people who don’t deserve it, especially in recent games (Walhart in Awakening, Rudolf in Echoes -- I can’t say if his whole ‘orchestrating a plan to have his son murder him’ thing is carry-over from Gaiden or not, but it definitely exists in the recent remake so I’m including it), but Edelgard actually ends up as a bit of a weird case. 

(I have a lot of thoughts about this, so I’m just going to cut preemptively.)

Now, I’m actually not opposed to Edelgard being the protagonist of the fourth route in Three Houses.  Anyone who’s been here a while knows that I generally see Grima, a figure that IntSys generally tries to paint as a rote villain, as at least a sympathetic villain (and possibly even a secret hero in the events of Awakening itself); it’s entirely possible for someone that’s a villain in most of their appearances to have legitimate reasons for what they’re doing and why, and revealing that in their personal route could be incredibly powerful if done well. 

And here��s the thing: Edelgard really is a compelling character, in large part because of her moral ambiguity.  I actually agree with her when she says that the Church of Seiros is corrupt at its core and the system needs to change.  She’s right about that!  While Seiros might have had decent reasons for establishing things this way, over the past thousand years human societies have changed while the church itself remained stagnant -- something potentially exacerbated by her selfish ambition to restore her mother -- and this has led to a structure that once served an important purpose becoming a toxic and destructive mess for humanity at large.  Edelgard has a completely valid point there, and it’s something that I could absolutely get on board with if she had gone about achieving change in some other way, because she does have other methods available to her that she writes off without real reason -- and even that can relate back in part to her deep trauma and difficulty trusting people after the betrayals she faced at the hands of her “uncle” and her own father’s powerlessness to stop the nightmare she and her siblings suffered through. 

IntSys probably could have crafted a narrative that showed from her perspective why she believed war against the Church was the only valid option available to her.  The issue is that she undercuts her own argument by targeting all of Fodlan, rather than specifically going after the Church: she doesn’t give the Kingdom and Alliance a “stay out of my way or else” warning, she literally turns her sights on the Kingdom as soon as the monastery falls and attempts to fully annex it once Cornelia sets up Dimitri’s fall, leaving the Alliance only because she has her hands full with Faerghus.  She didn’t have to take Cornelia up on her offer of making the Kingdom into the Dukedom of Faerghus and sending troops to finish the job: she could have just left the woman to her own devices, forcing the Twisted to utilize their own people to maintain and secure full control of the region while she worked on addressing the systemic issues, which would have had multiple benefits:

The Imperial Army doesn’t get overwhelmed and exhausted fighting in conditions they’re not equipped to deal with, leaving them stronger overall while the Twisted forces are potentially weakened by the same

Hubert is able to better assess the threat they’re dealing with, including learning their capabilities and possibly even where they’re coming from before Merceus

Edelgard actually puts her money where her mouth is and ends up helping the people she claims to be doing this for, rather than just using them as fodder for the war to grind up

Unfortunately, the way she’s written ends up just making her an imperialist.  She’s not just going after the corrupt core of the Church, she’s trying to forcibly unite the continent and return Fodlan to some long gone ideal where it was all united under the Imperial banner because she refuses to believe that Adrestia could have split by natural causes.

Crimson Flower ultimately ends up being a particularly egregious example of this glorification phenomenon in action because they give her a personal route that makes no effort to critically examine her actions and make her face consequences for them.  This, I think, does her a massive disservice as a character, because that aforementioned moral ambiguity that makes her so interesting could have been utilized to great effect -- and the proof is actually there already, because they do it in Dimitri’s route.

Dimitri is himself another interesting character, and outwardly presents as Edelgard’s polar opposite: he recognizes that he doesn’t have all the answers, struggles to figure out the correct course of action when presented with difficult subjects that have  no clear-cut answer -- like the fact that reliance on the Crest system is toxic for noble families, but it’s those very Crest-bearers and their Relics that help keep Faerghus safe from invasion by Sreng -- possesses incredible strength but specifically refrains using it in most cases to avoid harming others, and generally takes everyone’s problems onto himself to his own detriment.  He’s also deeply traumatized and was never given a chance to deal with it in a healthy manner, which contributes to how he snaps -- and Azure Moon starts with Dimitri being so far out of reach that you can’t unlock any of his supports and can’t even engage with him in the weekly discussions.  He’s lost himself to his survivor’s guilt and need for vengeance, considers himself to be nothing more than a monster, and has no qualms about killing if it helps advance his quest; as the story progresses, he faces a direct consequence for this murderous inclination in the form of Fleche who attempts to exact vengeance for her brother’s sake in the same way that he’s attempting to claim it for his family and friends -- only to lose Rodrigue, and have his dying words be a plea for Dimitri to live for himself rather than those who died before him, at which point Dimitri sets his sights on opposing Edelgard rather than killing her and seeing to atone for the crimes he committed.  While I think the game made the change a little too abrupt, it’s handled well overall, and shows a real development arc complete with both actions and their associated consequences that directly relate to Dimitri’s growth as a person.

Contrast this to Edelgard in general and Crimson Flower as a route.  Edelgard believes that she has all the answers despite not trying to engage with anyone outside her own House, decisively chooses what she believes to be the right and proper course of action regardless of how difficult the subject matter, possesses great strength (both physically and of sheer will) that she uses to dominate others, and forces others to join her in addressing what she sees as problems -- such as her line about making her own people into “worthy sacrifices” for her “higher cause.”  Crimson Flower is the only route where her attack on the monastery fails to capture Rhea, but once Byleth returns she sets her sights on attacking and subjugating a territory that has remained entirely neutral through the past five years, turns on the Twisted while she’s still in a vulnerable position which ultimately causes the deaths of at least a third of the forces she left at Arianrhod once they fire their warning shot, lies to her friends and allies about what happened there, murders her step-brother, and allows a city full of trapped civilians to burn unchecked while she deals with what she considers to be the “real” threat on the opposite side of the Faerghus capital -- and all of this is capped off with her never dealing with the Twisted, and cute little endcards that talk about how everything worked out fine and there were no problems ever, The End.  Edelgard doesn’t get a development arc in her route: she’s never challenged, she never faces real consequences (and the one she does face she literally lies about to her friends and then leaves as a problem to deal with later), and she pretty much ends the game exactly where she started it: completely assured that she made the right choices.  The moral ambiguity inherent in her character is instead cast as “of course she’s in the right, she’s so great and there’s nothing at all wrong with what she’s doing or how she’s going about it, isn’t she wonderful?”

At least in the main game, Hegemon Husk Edelgard is treated with real gravity, shown as the pinnacle of her drive to see her ambition come to fruition and the tragic consequence of her inability to change course and find another path.  The Forging Bonds event just takes the CF brush and paints her actions as the right ones, even though what made her so compelling is that her reasons were right while her methods were horrific.  Edelgard really could have been wonderful.  The potential is right there in her character.  But IntSys completely botched the execution of it, so that her route feels rushed, incomplete, and at best unsatisfying (or, if you’re me, utterly disgusting for how it glorifies imperialistic conquest), and her Heroes appearances only make it worse.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

When Harry Met Buffy

by Dan H

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Dan compares portrayals of childhood in the popular media. Or something.~

(This article contains spoilers for a TV series which everybody has seen, and a set of books which everybody has read. Just so you know.)

At some point during my university career, I had to make a choice between actually getting a decent degree and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Needless to say there was no competition, and I am now the proud owner of a 2.2 in Physics and a lot of information about Sunnydale.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the rails a bit in the later seasons. It went off the rails for a number of reasons - tensions among the cast and crew, Joss Whedon being distracted by other projects, Marti Noxon - but its biggest problem, in my opinion, was that it lost sight of its core metaphor.

The strength of Buffy seasons 1-3 was that it stuck to a very clear, very simple formula. You take a stock Teen Issue (I'm going out with a guy who isn't suitable, my mother is putting me under a lot of pressure, I'm trying to live up to my elder brother) and then give it a supernatural slant (I'm going out with a vampire, my mother is literally possessing my body, I've animated the dead body of my elder brother and am trying to build him a girlfriend out of corpse parts). That was the way it worked. It kept this formula more or less throughout series four and five, but it mixed up the formula a bit: Joyce's illness in series five is wholly mundane, and it's college life that causes Buffy's biggest problems in series four, not the cybernetic killing machine. Series six and seven went even further, making "Buffy never learned to live in the real world because she spent all of her time fighting monsters" a central theme, despite the fact that the "monsters" had always been placeholders for real-world issues.

To put it another way, the great strength of Buffy is that it tackles teenage concerns from a resolutely teenage perspective. When you're sixteen, after all, everything is the end of the world. Buffy's distorted, teenaged view of reality, where a bad breakup is an unimaginable horror and high school is doing its damnedest to kill you becomes literal reality. This works brilliantly for three series, and then they start to run into problems.

The thing is, Buffy grows up. The show covers seven years, and Joss felt that it was very important that she not stay sixteen forever.

The problem is that a big part of growing up is the development of your worldview. Learning that things don't really work the way you thought they did. Or, to put it another way, a big part of being twenty-two is realising what a pillock you were when you were sixteen.

But Buffy can't really do that, because she's a fictional character, and her sixteen-year-old worldview is the literal truth of the earlier series. Angel, her high-school boyfriend, really was the love of her life, and when things went wrong he actually lost his soul and started killing people. You can't get a sense of perspective on something like that. You can't look back on your youth and say "gosh, it seems so silly now to have worried about the Master rising and plunging the world into hell." Its early-season strengths become its late-season flaws. Buffy can never truly grow up, because she is trapped, forever, in a world where her teenage angst is physical reality.

Which brings me to Harry Potter.

Like Buffy, Harry Potter has a seven-year arc, over which his creator takes great pride in telling us that He Will Grow Up. And, like the nutrimatic machine, Harry's problems are Almost But Not Quite Totally Unlike Buffy's.

The Potter books are told exclusively from Harry's point of view: so much so that Harry has to spend half of each book skulking around under his invisibility cloak so he can hear all the plot-dumps Rowling needs to pass on to the reader. However, unlike Buffy, we don't follow Harry from a world inside his own head. We follow him around looking over his shoulder, but we are only observers. Buffy/Angel is convincing because, on some level, we feel what Buffy is feeling, and we are swept away in an overwhelming rush of teenage emotion. Harry/Ginny, on the other hand, feels lacklustre, because we see it from the outside, as two awkward teens fumbling through a parody of romance.

The Potter approach is not without its advantages. It makes the seven-year arc somewhat more consistent: we know from the start that it's Voldemort and the Death Eaters and the War in The Wizarding World which is important, and Harry's journey from two-dimensional eleven-year-old to two-dimensional-eighteen-year-old is essentially one of learning facts about his world. (On a tangent, it's interesting to note that Potter has a detailed, prewritten world with a large mythology, and Buffy doesn't).

In

an earlier article

, I compared the Potter books to the works of Enid Blyton and like Blyton, Rowling writes about children from the outside. She writes about childhood in hindsight, and seems to view it with a mixture of sentimentality and contempt. Your school days, she seems to say, were the most wonderful days of your life, because you were too dumb to realise how crappy the world really was.

All of this would be fair enough, a lot of Children's books do basically work like that: the hero starts out as a picture of youth and innocence, only to have it stripped away by exposure to Real World Issues. It's the To Kill a Mockingbird school of children's fiction: the child gradually learns about the complexities of the real world, progressing from a nave worldview to a sophisticated one over the course of the story. His Dark Materials follows a similar formula. The problem with Potter is that the "real world" of the Potterverse is so utterly childish. Harry is growing up into a world where everybody is still obsessed with school, where the only person that He Who Must Not Be Named is afraid of is his old teacher, where three fifteen year old kids competing in a school sporting event is international news.

So Harry's journey is that of a child growing up and learning about the world, but what he learns is that there is no world outside of Hogwarts. Unlike Buffy, whose later-season problems are the result of legitimate creative decisions, Harry's late-series implausibility is a result of his inhabiting a world which is poorly conceived and badly realised.

Harry Potter is often praised for dealing with difficult real-world themes, like death and racism. It doesn't. It's true that people die in the books, but they do so as a result of magical, fantasy violence, which simply doesn't capture the experience of bereavement in a meaningful way. Quite a lot of children, reading Harry Potter, might well have lost a friend or family member due to illness, old age, or accident. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that none of them have had anybody they care about killed by evil wizards. The deaths in Harry Potter are part of the fantasy, they're no more real than chocolate frogs and Quiddich.

Then there's the "racism". Wizardry apparently runs in families, and those who don't come from a wizarding line get called "mudbloods". There's some half-baked talk of killing the mudbloods, but nobody ever does anything about it, and it's only ever evil people that even think like that. That isn't confronting the issue of racism, that's using a cheap metaphor for racism as another way to demonstrate how evil your villains are. It is a metaphor, furthermore, which only has any impact if your audience already recognises it - we know that it's wrong for Draco to call Hermione a mudblood, because it's "like racism". It's not using a fantasy world to explore a real world issue, it's using a real world issue to explore a fantasy world.

And this, I think, is why I think Buffy succeeds and Potter - despite sales figures - ultimately fails. Buffy has its metaphors screwed on right. Well, apart from that bit with the crackhouse in series six. Buffy takes issues that its audience will be highly familiar with (academic pressure, romantic disaster, teenage insecurity) and uses the language of the supernatural to explore them in an emotionally believable way. Harry Potter, on the other hand uses real-world issues (racism, slavery, death) as a cheap way to add colour to an otherwise unconvincing fantasy world.

In Sunnydale, Joss Whedon created a world which reflects the mind of a young girl growing up in America, and he succeeded admirably. In Hogwarts, Joanne Rowling attempted to create a dark, believable world for a young boy to grow up in, and she failed dismally.Themes:

J.K. Rowling

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Books

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TV & Movies

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Young Adult / Children

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Whedonverse

~

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Rami

at 09:00 on 2007-06-15Hmmm... that's interesting. I'm one of the few people who's neither read Harry (though I've seen one of the films) nor watched Buffy (not consistently, at least), but I'm inclined to agree that Whedon's way of presenting his world is deeper and more meaningful though perhaps less immediately obvious. Heck, I didn't appreciate Whedon at all until I saw Firefly...

[aegisreflections]

Thoughts on the Current State of Street Fighter V

You may have noticed that I’ve been shying away from Street Fighter (particularly Street Fighter V) themed content as of late. There are several reasons for this, chief among which are my feelings about the current state of Street Fighter V as a whole. My thoughts on this topic are lengthy, so I’m gonna go ahead and lay them all out under the cut. TL;DR version at the end.

Street Fighter V had a rough start. Servers were unstable, features were somewhat slim for a $60 purchase, and the balance was a bit questionable. At it’s core though, as a fighting game, it showed a lot of potential. I genuinely like the systems they had in place, and looked forward to how they’d evolve and build upon them in the future. Hell, the first month I spent with SFV was more fun for me than the entire 7 year life span of Street Fighter IV. While the short term of the first three or so months after release seemed like rough waters, there was a ton of promise on the horizon. That’s where the key issues lie, however. I personally feel SFV has utterly failed to evolve as a game. 

Since launch they’ve added new features; a cinematic story, daily/weekly challenges, combo trials, and as of writing this a total of 8 DLC characters. On paper that all sounds great. In reality, though, aside from the DLC characters those are all features that in the end felt like they should have been there from the start. The fact that they weren’t was disappointing, and the fact that they were EVENTUALLY added in didn’t really do much for the game as a whole. On top of this, the bulk of the content they’ve added, the DLC characters, ended up being of debatable relevance as well. When you consider that, at their original time of release, every DLC character (sans Guile) was considered low or nearly bottom tier compared to the rest of the cast, it was easy to see there was something wrong with how they were balancing the new fighters against the established top tier fighters. 

To Capcom’s credit, they did eventually realize this flaw in their balancing. However, the way they went about correcting it ended up creating more problems than it solved. Basically what ended up happening was Capcom took the two strongest DLC fighters they had made (Guile and Urien), buffed them up a ton, nerfed the established top tier characters (Ryu and Nash) to the point where they are now borderline useless by comparison, and for the rest of the cast made some minor tweaks that moved tiers around ever so slightly between them. That’s it. No buffs noteworthy buffs for the mid tiers, no major changes to the bottom tiers. Most of the cast of SFV was basically left untouched compared to the shifts seen at the top of the tier list and between Guile and Urien. It would seem Capcom’s idea of balancing the game is to simply rotate characters in and out of the top 3 slots and not really worry much about how fun it is to play against them when you’re playing someone outside of those slots. It’s fine for the people who want to play Guile and Urien, but if you want to play as any other member of the cast you may as well put your controller down against them.

Balance isn’t the only gameplay issue facing SFV right now either. I mentioned how I enjoyed the mechanics of SFV at launch, and looked forward to how they would develop over time. But, sadly, they haven’t developed. Not even a little. I had expected by Season 2 coming around we would have seen some sort of change to at least one of the core mechanics. Maybe add new sets of skills for character’s v-systems; new skills and triggers. Maybe a new way to use meter in general, hell, you could give us special cancels in exchange for using v-meter. SFV may not be receiving periodic new repackages in the forms of Super Street Fighter V and so on, but that doesn’t excuse a lack of evolution of gameplay systems over time in the manner these previous iterations gave us. I was under the assumption new seasons would bring more than just characters, and I’m disappointed to see that doesn’t seem to be the case so far.

Speaking of the new season, it is perhaps the biggest thing keeping me away from Street Fighter V right now. Capcom’s idea for Season 2 is, in my opinion, one of the most puzzling decisions they have made throughout this game’s life cycle. The idea of bringing in a cast of entire new characters, sight unseen, and expecting the entire community to A. Be excited about every upcoming release and B. Go so far as to pre-order them through a second season pass purchase is completely ludicrous to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of SFV having new characters. I think FANG, Laura, and Rashid are great characters (in concept, at least, and I’m not even going near Necalli) and welcome additions to the SF universe. However, to base an entire season SOLELY off of brand new faces is the fighting game marketing equivalent of New Coke. Not only did no one ask for it, but you’re taking away the thing people actually want from you (classic characters, in this case) in favor of the thing no one asked for instead. It would’ve been fine had you sprinkled it in along your line up of other products, perhaps people would have even liked it, but instead you have a package no one has any reason to be invested in at all. Characters sell fighting games, and giving people characters they know and recognize is chiefly important to selling SFV’s style of downloadable content. This approach does nothing positive for the game, especially when Capcom won’t even give us a HINT as to what each of these new characters holds for us gameplay wise. It hurts the current customers who would like to see familiar faces, it hurts would be customers who are WAITING for familiar faces, and, what should be most pressing to Capcom, it hurts Capcom. Because when you lack familiar faces, and give no cohesive details on what the new faces have to offer your customers, you end up in a situation where no one is confident enough to buy them. I guess it’s no wonder they keep shelling out costume DLC.  

Frankly it’s all a bit disappointing that this is where we are right now. I truly believe Street Fighter V has potential to be a great fighting game, but the current prospects aren’t as promising as what I had hoped for this time last year. Capcom’s complacency in regards to balance and evolving mechanics, on top of lack luster features and a marketing nightmare scenario have resulted in a game that I can in no way recommend to anyone at this point. And those are just the big points! I haven’t even touched the slew of PC specific issues that still exist to this day, lingering bugs with battle lounges, features that existed in USF4 that are still MIA from SFV, the unreliability of online matchmaking and connections, the fact that Birdie has been unjustifiably shafted when he never did anything wrong and is a precious boy who deserves nothing but the best, the list goes on into infinity at this point and it’s become too depressing to even bother. 

In closing, SFV is currently a massive source of disappointment for me, and until they sort out their mess I’m not motivated to keep up with its current affairs. The drought of SF related content will likely be persistent on this blog, at least until I inevitably pick up 3S again, or SFV suddenly becomes a good video game. In the meantime, I’m fully invested in my renewed love for Guilty Gear; a series the developers actually know what they’re doing with and only gets better and better. Good job Arc System Works, you’re a better company than the people who decided horror games don’t sell and Megaman should be exiled to Street Fighter x Tekken. Now if only they’d get a handle on their PC ports.

TL;DR - Capcom is consistently fucking up everything they do in relation to this game. It’s imbalanced, they show no interest in evolving the core mechanics, and Season 2 is a concept that is dead on arrival. My interest in the game as a whole is rapidly fading, and it will show on this blog. Also, everyone should go play Guilty Gear Xrd.