#and weren’t alienated from society for a variety of reasons.

[suzanne-holds-the-mirror]

.

[stuff-from-the-void-matron]

My MC Headcanons (Piglins)

General Piglin Headcanons

• Piglins are simultaneously communal and independent creatures. They have communal housing that is hidden underground, since the further down they go the closer to the void they get and the colder it gets. Which, in the Nether, is the most optimal place for any non flame resistant mob to set up base. It’s also almost impossible to enter a piglin commune without being killed on the spot. If you thought bastions were dangerous to enter then it would be best to avoid piglin communes at all cost.

• Piglins also raise their young as a group, with each member of a ‘circle’ rearing the ‘piglings’ together once they’re old enough to walk around on their own. But before that, when piglings are still small enough to need milk, their ‘sows’ tend to them mostly as a pair. And both male and female piglin parents can produce milk for their farrow, to ensure one parent isn’t taking on the taxing activity by themselves.

• Now gold. The thing that Piglins are notorious for coveting. The gorgeous metal that will stop any piglin in its tracks just so it can gaze upon it, even if it’s full on aggro at the time. Piglins are smart, gold is a valuable resource, it's a naturally magical conductor and enchants easily (not true for all metals/minerals, emeralds are almost impossible to enchant). Piglins also figured out gold’s healing and medicinal properties long before humankind. If it weren’t for them then who knows how long we’d have gone without golden apples?

• Now on to Brutes. The strongest Piglin kind has to offer. And this is no coincidence. Brutes go through insanely hard training to get their titles once they’ve entered maturity. And they endure that painful training to protect their communes, which are always either directly under or within walking distance of the bastions they guard so fiercely. The bastion is actually sort of a red herring somewhat to trick any non Piglins (aka players) into thinking they got the prize so okay yes they can leave now, goodbye. Very clever of the Piglins.

• And speaking of bastions (and gold in general), the reason Piglins become so aggressive when they catch anyone taking from chests (besides the obvious, you know damn well those things aren’t yours) or mining gold is because Piglins have a ritual that they believe must be done before the acquisition of divine gold can be completed. It’s not a long ritual, it’s actually just saying a simple phrase in their native tongue, before accepting the gold/item. 

• The closest version of this we all (the players) have is when we say thank you when someone gives/gifts us something. We don’t think much of the act of them saying thank you really, it’s seen as quite insignificant... until it’s not there, then it’s a big deal. Now say we as a society placed an almost religious value on the act of saying thank you.. and suddenly the aggression Piglins show isn’t so strange.

• Their diets are omnivorous is nature, consuming almost anything they can chew and swallow. They’ve even been known to cannibalize their own kind under extremely harsh conditions. But when things are normal they’re known to eat a wide variety of foods, including but not limited to; Hoglin meat, Strider meat, Magma cubes, crimson fungus, warped fungus, and more. Needless to say, food sources are limited in the hellish dimension known as the Nether. So being picky isn’t really an option if you want to survive.

• And speaking of the Nether’s harsh climate, Piglins require water to survive, unlike most mobs in their dimension. Which sounds impossible to anyone who ever set foot there since water evaporates the moment it’s dispersed (aka tossed from a bucket). But water isn’t totally alien to the Nether. Without water fungi cannot grow or reproduce, so there is in fact water in the dimension. So in order to acquire water Piglins must harvest the giant fungi before filtering out the water from them so they have drinking water.

[script-a-world]

How could I have an alien society that is mostly illiterate if they aren't royalty or an official but not have it be classism or anything backwards? Is that possible? By having other things being more or less equal so this comes across as a choice rather than uneducated?

Tex: Historically, writing was invented as a means to preserve important information, such as notable events and/or notable people. One’s (religious) history was often a main point, as well as noting down whomever was a ruler at such and such time, and any accompanying major construction projects (see: temples, pyramids, roads, etc) or meetings with other groups of people (see: treaties, wars). Natural disasters may feature on the list, but in the past have typically been attributed as an Act of God and are usually filed under “deity of the day is angry with us”/“deity governing aspect of natural disaster is revelling/in a different mood”.

Anyone in that context who didn’t learn how to read and/or write was usually illiterate because they didn’t need to be literate - they weren’t of the religious class, they weren’t a historian, they weren’t royalty or nobility, and probably weren’t merchants, either.

However, in much the same vein as modern parents who want their children to have better lives, parents in past cultures would take any available opportunity to have their children tutored in even the smallest bit of literacy, because it would open up doors that would otherwise be closed to them (see: ancient Egypt and late imperial Mandarin).

The multiple times mass-production of printed text has been invented and the subsequent revolutions of the lower classes to greater equality showcases the idea that if the option for literacy exists as a form of communication, people were going to grab at it with both hands.

In such a context, the only way for illiteracy to not be classist or “backwards” (I’m assuming you mean some form of immoral or perceived as disgusting in a moral setting) is for everyone to be illiterate - i.e. there is no written form of language to not know. If you’re still wishing to fulfill the goals of my first paragraph, try out a verbal history, such as story-telling and/or traditional music/cants.

Utubazu: Plenty of complex cultures have not used writing or not used it widely. So far as we know, no South American civilisations had widespread literacy (it's a matter of significant debate whether quipu were a writing system or not). Nor are any pre-Columbian North American civilisations north of Mesoamerica known to have utilised writing (obviously, we can't know if they wrote on something perishable, and we have only one European account of the complex urban cultures of south-eastern North America and the Mississippi before their collapse). 

Throughout history literacy has often been a specialised skill, there's a reason scribes were skilled professionals in many cultures. This was for a variety of reasons - often just that most people only needed a very basic level of literacy for their day-to-day lives because handwritten texts took time and resources to produce, which made them valuable and rare. Most people's general interaction with writing would be limited to essentially receipts and memos, which tend to be pretty formulaic, and perhaps prayers and spells, which are also generally formulaic. 

Another factor is that not every writing system is alphabetic. Logosyllabic systems like Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform could have hundreds or thousands of characters, which is a lot to remember and require years of study to master (and often it's not just a case of switching to a simpler system, not every language works like Indo-European ones, and languages like Sumerian and those of the Sinitic family can have a lot of homophones and require the large number of characters to clarify what is meant). Other times the written language can fossilise old forms and pronunciations, slowly diverging from the spoken (or signed, theoretically) language(s) until they bear little clear resemblance. English isn't even the worst for this.

Other times there might simply not be a written form for the language of the community. There are many languages in the world today that are generally or entirely unwritten. In this case literacy means learning another language, which takes time and resources and is therefore not necessarily practical or even useful for everybody.

[tcm]

“Much More to Movie Monsters Than Meets The Eye” By Raquel Stecher

With his latest book Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond, author and horror expert David J. Skal provides readers with the perfect guide for watching spooky films throughout October and the year. The book takes a look at 31 different horror films from NOSFERATU (‘22) to GET OUT (2017). Skal offers insights into how German Expressionism and WWI influenced early horror classics, how Val Lewton threw out horror conventions with CAT PEOPLE (‘42), how DRACULA (‘31) was a financial gamble and how more recent films like HOCUS POCUS (‘93) achieved cult status. If you’re worried that 31 horror films are not enough, don’t despair, as each of these films is paired with a bonus recommendation on a similar theme. Fright Favorites is now available from Running Press and TCM.

Raquel Stecher: Can you tell us a bit about your background as a cultural historian and horror expert?

David J. Skal: I was one of the original “monster kids” of the 1950s and ‘60s, who discovered the old Universal horror classics when they were first released to television, and for a while I couldn’t get enough of them, or of the fan culture they set in motion. I was an avid reader of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and when I came back as an adult to write about the history of horror entertainment from an adult perspective, it would never have happened without those photo-filled periodicals that engaged and obsessed me as a kid.

RS: In the book you discuss the connection between Hollywood and Halloween. Tell us a little about how that came about and how the two have become so intrinsically tied with one another.

DJS: In the golden age of American horror movies in the 1930s and 1940s, there was no supplemental merchandizing or other tie-ins to Halloween. It was still a pretty homespun holiday. The holiday’s potential wasn’t fully exploited by the film industry until after World War II, when we saw Universal franchising its monster characters as Halloween masks and costumes. In the ensuing decades, October became the major month for horror movie premieres, including studios other than Universal, and all the major theme parks got on the bandwagon, profitably extending their summer seasons with Halloween nights that are almost always tied in to some horror franchise or another, frequently of the slasher or chainsaw variety.

RS: What was the research process like for writing Fright Favorites?

DJS: Over the years I’ve done much more research for my books than I’ve been able to ever use, so Fright Favorites was an ideal opportunity to make use of information and anecdotes I’d never had room for in previous projects. As a result, it took about six months rather than the usual full year I most often devote to completing a book. Although the final selections were mine, the people at TCM are also—no surprise—very knowledgeable about movies with many favorites of their own that I was able to incorporate. There weren’t really any disagreements, just a bit of a juggling act to maintain a balance between the films included.

RS: In the book you wrote “Some early commentators on the medium worried that film might be nothing less than the arrival of living death. It is in horror movies that this pervading sense of the uncanny still speaks to us.” Were studios worried about making horror films? How did Universal's success with the genre affect the film industry as a whole?

DJS: In a way, the film medium itself is the very definition of the uncanny, bringing dead actors back to life, or its convincing simulacrum. This strange fact is always there, staring back at you. And remember, actors themselves have amounted to a species of shapeshifters, slipping in and out of identities in the manner of movie monsters. Film is a dream-like medium that has been irresistibly drawn to the fantastic and the bizarre from its very beginning, at least in Europe. American movies didn’t approach truly fantastic subjects until Universal took a chance with DRACULA in 1931. Previously, American films observed the tradition of explaining away any ghostly occurrence as a criminal conspiracy or ruse. But DRACULA, along with FRANKENSTEIN the same year, became two of the most influential and imitated films of all time.

RS: Stars like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Vincent Price, etc. became known for their horror roles. How did some of these horror stars embrace the genre or how did it typecast them?

DJS: By definition, any “horror star” is already typecast, although some deal with the pigeonholing better than others. I once had the privilege of sitting in on a classroom visit by Vincent Price with a group of acting students who asked him if he resented being considered a horror star and how they could avoid being typecast themselves. He told them in no uncertain terms that show business was already a difficult way to make a living and that being typecast would be the best thing that could ever happen to them professionally. Most horror stars I’ve met or interviewed are grateful for their fame and the attention of their fans.

RS: Many horror stories have been revisited in remakes, new adaptations and re-imaginings. Why has Hollywood been so keen to revisit horror classics?

DJS: Horror is a genre with financial profit baked in from the get-go—it’s almost impossible to lose money even on a poorly made scary movie, which is why so many prominent directors have gotten their start in the genre. It’s a fairly risk-free way to take a chance on new talent. In terms of remakes, if a formula has worked before, why not do it again? Fortunately, the remakes usually veer substantially away from the original stories in ways that keep the legacy of one monster or legend perpetually alive. Horror evolves the way anything evolves—through endless change and adaptation.

RS: What are some of your personal favorite horror films?

DJS: I don’t have a number one, or number two favorite. I admire many films for individual reasons: directors, scripts, actors. People most often ask me what my favorite version of Dracula is. I tell them that it doesn’t yet exist, but it would be a master version of the story edited together from all the major adaptations, with actors from different versions interacting with each other. It would be a huge job, but if done with the right flair would be hugely entertaining and probably bring out important aspects of each version that you wouldn’t notice watching them individually.

RS: Some of the films you feature in Fright Favorites are also considered science fiction classics. How do the two genres of science fiction and horror complement each other?

DJS: Literary horror and literary science fiction are fairly separate categories, but on screen the genres tend to blur together. For instance, ALIEN (‘79) is a haunted house story set in outer space. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (‘78) is an alien invasion story that’s also about zombies. Being a visual medium, movies tend to spotlight science fiction’s bizarre and grotesque imagery and end up emphasizing the horrific over the cerebral.

RS: How do horror films tap into the pervading anxieties and fears of their respective eras?

DJS: This is the through-line of most of my books: that horror entertainment amounts to a secret history of modern times, with each new cultural upheaval or trauma setting in motion identifiable kinds of stories and characters. The anxiety and fear need to be processed, but it’s always easier to deal with real-world horror if you don’t have to look at it too directly. WWI tore about human bodies like no previous war, and all through the 1920s and 1930s we looked at one disfigured face after another, even though the films weren’t about battlefield combat. Unprecedented numbers of mutilated men were returning to society, and they were being shunned. Nonetheless, they popped up in our cinematic dreams. During the AIDS epidemic, there was an explosion of books and films about another mysterious, blood-related scourge: vampirism. Repress awareness of an uncomfortable fact, and it will always rise somewhere else in a different form.

RS: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

DJS: So far, the book does seem to be engaging readers who have a general knowledge of horror entertainment but are curious to know more. The most important thing a reader might take away is the simple revelation that there’s much more to movie monsters than meets the eye.

[mashounen2003]

Sonic opinions - 4

Initially, the purpose of my fanfics was almost only to think of a possible continuation of the events of Sonic SatAM, adapting things from the Archie-Sonic comics (and taking some licenses in the process), and trying to better write Antoine's transition from his self in the cartoon to his self in the comics, give more importance to Tails and better portray his parents, Amadeus and Rosemary. But then I realized how abysmal the differences between the two versions of Antoine were, while it was also harder for me to think of a way to write Rosemary coherently.

In Antoine's case, lately, I came up with an alternative to make him develop and stop being what he was in the TV series:

Immediately after the original Robotnik has been defeated, Antoine leaves his team behind. He actually doesn't know how to fight, but he still has good marksmanship, so he becomes a hitman. However, he's eventually convinced to leave behind that life without honour, begins to train in real fighting skills and becomes a genuine Freedom Fighter once and for all. In any case, he develops an opinion of "the end justifies the means" and continues thinking it for the rest of the story, being critical of his former team; this, along with his lasting grudge against Sonic and Sally, leads him to fight against the Monarchy in the events of "Civil War".

As for Rosemary... I don't like to say it this way, but she was a total b**** in the comics. I came up with a way to show her in a better light, but in no way could it have worked with the comics' Rosemary as she was. I'll talk about it when I write my list of ideas for future fanfics.

--------------------------------------------------

I also addressed Politics in that fictional universe, trying to avoid the way this was done in the comics: there, Ian Flynn created the Council of Acorn and portrayed it as a bunch of stereotyped useless politicians obsessed with controlling the heroes and barely concerned with their country's security, and I think Flynn didn't do it to actually enrich the comics' universe or to add depth to the story or to communicate certain political ideas, but only to give readers someone to blame.

In the stories I wrote so far, I didn't go deep into what happened with my fictional universe's Council of Acorn after its creation; however, I did address its origin, and in doing so, I didn't make the Bems involved. Look... In the comics, Tails's parents were inspired by the Bems to try to establish a Democracy in Acorn, and this entails some inconvenience:

The Bems are terrible people. They roboticized Sonic and Tails to make them fight Robotnik and Snively, in order to verify the robots were better than flesh-and-blood beings (if things had happened differently, perhaps Mobius's Robians wouldn't have been de-roboticized); their society is entirely made of clones and almost lacks variety, not only in terms of the physical but also in terms of people's ideas; their judicial system is quite f***ed up (at least according to our standards), and... *sigh* they're just the worst. These traits of the Bems had been developed when Karl Bollers wrote the comics, and Flynn should have considered that they’re technically canon before having Tails's parents claim to have been inspired by those aliens.

Even if we cling to Moral Relativism with all our strength, claiming the Bems are just "different" and have different behaviour, mindset, psychology and culture, this keeps making things complicated: applying something in one society, solely because it succeeded in another, ain't exactly something smart to do.

And the craziest of all is that it could have been avoided very easily: Flynn could simply have said there were previous failed attempts to establish a Democracy in other countries of Mobius and Amadeus & Rosemary had always wanted a change in the government system, had learned about those historical events and knew (or believed they knew, at least) how to do it right this time. Moreover, Flynn could have said the decade spent by Tails's parents with the Bems gave them a clue about what they should not do when finally returning to their homeworld.

I tried, in my work, to use this idea of Amadeus & Rosemary wanting to establish a Democracy in an attempt to succeed in what others in other parts of Mobius had failed throughout History. It was based upon what happened in the French Revolution (more precisely, the Jacobin period), the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, and mainly the First English Revolution: in 1648, the Monarchy was overthrown in England; the change was violent and chaotic, the government that took the place of the King ended up being also a despotic tyranny, and the final result was just the return of a King to power in 1660 (although, anyway, the Glorious Revolution established in 1688 the British parliamentary system as we know it); Thomas Hobbes, while watching those events unfold, wrote his book Leviathan, where he justified the need for an Absolute Monarchy by arguing humans were violent, selfish, chaotic and brutal by nature, so they had signed a symbolic pact where they ceded all their rights and their power to a single person in charge of ruling with an iron fist, in order to prevent humanity from destroying itself. In my fanfics' universe, it was mentioned those attempts at democratization in Mobius led to civil wars, ended with those same peoples clinging to ideas similar to those of Hobbes, quickly restoring the Monarchy and promising themselves not to try and establish a Democracy ever again.

I also mentioned the recurring conflicts between the Acorn Kings and the Southern Barons in the comics, as well as the connection between the Kings and the infamous Source of All, among other things. I also had Amadeus do what he should have done in the comics when he explained why he wanted there to be Democracy: to present historical events, such as those conflicts, the Kings' cult of the Source of All and the technological and cultural backwardness to which the people were subjected by them, as concrete examples of how the Monarchy had never worked well.

--------------------------------------------------

There are several Sonic fans, including @toaarcan and @robotnik-mun, who argue Politics shouldn't have been addressed at all in Sonic stories. Also, the vast majority of Sonic fans claim each and every one of the attempts to make this series more serious were some of the worst things that could have happened, even the addition of more characters was nothing but a cancer, and everything should have remained "simple" or the Sonic franchise shouldn't have gone beyond what it was at the time of the classic Genesis games. I praise the stories written by @toaarcan, and I agree with many of the opinions of both him and @robotnik-mun, but with all due respect, I totally disagree on this particular point.

I've always believed that, if it's done right, any topic should be able to be addressed in any kind of fiction, and Politics is no exception; more exactly, I think an author has two options when writing a work aimed at children and young people: to write something super light and soft where no serious topic is addressed, or to "go all-in" and address all serious topics, leaving nothing out; this includes not only Politics, but also tragedies, the complexities of love, toxic interpersonal relationships (whether abusive or otherwise), bullying, mental illness, trauma (for example, that caused by war), societal issues, and so on. That's one of the many whys of my love for RWBY: there's nothing that web-series doesn't talk about. As for the proper and respectful LGBTQ+ representation, rather than a serious topic reserved for serious fictional works, it's a requirement every fictional work should meet, whether serious or not, especially in the middle of the 21st century (this is something I think my work didn't meet satisfactorily).

With Sonic SatAM and the comics, it looked like the second option could have worked in the Sonic franchise too, and the TV series did it right to some extent. Unfortunately, Archie-Sonic's writers almost never did things right in regards to relationships between characters: Ken Penders's work, in particular, is an example of how relationships should never be, and Flynn's attempt to talk about Politics was a complete disaster, not much better than Penders's heinous handling of political stuff, more similar to a very low-quality North-American political satire, even when the conflict portrayed wasn't of the "Right versus Left" kind but of the "Monarchy versus Republic" kind, which should have been much easier to do without ruining everything. The only ones who didn't fall into those same mistakes were Gallagher and Angelo DeCesare, the comics' first writers, but only because they chose the first option: to write stories that weren't serious at all... with the notable exception of "Growing Pains", the B-story of issues #28 and #29, a typical Shakespearean tragedy where they presented us Auto-Fiona, a robot replica of who would later be one of the most controversial characters in the comics.

This, coupled with the resounding failure of Sonic 2006, is the only reason why now almost everyone in the Sonic fandom prefers stories without anything serious and/or a return to the Classic Sonic era, with very underdeveloped characters who are turned into mere plot devices and are only a shadow of their former self or of what they could have been.

[otterknowbynow]

Gotcha Day (1/3)

The catalyst for Team Voltron adopting a dog might be an offhand demand from Lance, but let's be real: several of them are very much on board with this plan.

Written as part of Gentron Week 2020 as a combination of the prompts "Adopting a Pet Together" and "Cultural Exchange", in two three parts.

Part 2 Here | Part 3 Here | Also on ao3

“Listen, Kaltenecker needs a puppy friend,” Lance says one evening. Keith blinks and props himself up on his elbows from where he’s been lying on the couch. He turns his head toward where Lance is sitting on the floor, trying to remember if there was any context for this in previous conversation, but he doesn’t think so. All five paladins are in the lounge, which seems to be why Lance has brought it up, despite the fact that he and Pidge are currently deeply engaged in some kind of fighting game with tiny laser-blasting spaceships. If it were a bit more realistic, it might be good flight training for the lions, Keith thinks. 

“Does she?” asks Pidge, pressing a few buttons in such quick succession that Keith has no idea what they were. Glancing at the screen, he’s not sure what they did, either. 

“Of course she does,” Lance says, not looking up from the screen in front of him. His fingers still moving rapidly on the controller in his hands, he continues. “Who among us has experience with bovine needs? Me, I do. Who among us can read her body language and tell you what those needs are? Me, I can. Therefore, I can tell you: she needs a puppy friend.” 

“And this would have nothing to do with you wanting a puppy for yourself,” Keith says flatly, sitting up all the way now. This might be interesting. 

“Definitely not,” Lance agrees, sticking his tongue halfway out of his mouth and holding his controller to one side as his ship on the screen executes some kind of quick maneuver around Pidge’s. 

“I don’t think it’s a terrible idea,” Shiro says mildly from a couch across the way. He’s still looking down at whatever he’s been reading on his tablet. Keith isn’t sure if it’s the tone in Shiro’s voice that gives him away or if he’s just remembering all the times he heard Shiro talk about getting a dog back at the Garrison, but it sure seems like he thinks it’s a better idea than just not terrible. 

“You planning on raising this puppy yourself?” Pidge asks skeptically. 

“I’m planning on all of us raising this puppy together,” Lance says decisively, and apparently he’s equally decisive in-game, because there’s a trilling victory sound from the screen in front of them and Pidge’s shoulders drop before she hits a few buttons on her controller. 

“Rematch,” she says, and Lance nods. 

“I don’t know, raising a puppy is a lot of work,” says Hunk thoughtfully. It’s clear his mind is only half on this conversation, though, since he hasn’t looked away from the small white devices in front of him that he’s been working on for the better part of an hour. 

“Seems like you should talk to Coran,” says Shiro mildly. “Seems like he’d be best equipped to handle the situation.” 

“You don’t think I can handle one puppy?” Lance asks sharply, looking up from the screen for half a second just to direct a glare at Shiro. 

“Oh, handling the puppy won’t be the problem.” Shiro grins, and Keith huffs a small laugh to himself. 

“Of course it won’t,” says Lance irritably, this time still zipping his little ship around the screen, tongue out to one side again in concentration. “I can handle a puppy in my sleep -- I could handle puppies, plural, in my sleep.” Keith snorts at that, remembering a foster he had who raised a new puppy while he lived there.

“I’m pretty sure sleep loss is part of the deal,” he says before he can stop himself. Not that he would want to -- Lance can’t just be spouting inaccuracies when they’re talking about bringing in a whole-ass animal they’ll be responsible for. 

“It’s a figure of speech, pal.” He would probably be more irritated if he weren’t mid-game, but Pidge seems to be gaining the upper hand and all his focus is on that. Shiro clears his throat before continuing. 

“What I was saying is that Coran would know where we could go about finding a puppy out here -- in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly in a position to visit the humane society or research a local breeder or anything. Coran could probably figure out where to go and give us some idea of what kind of, uh, dog we could really even hope of finding.” 

“That’s fair,” offers Hunk. “We don’t want to end up with some weird alien puppy without even any guidance from someone who’s, like, familiar with at least a reasonable variety of weird alien puppies.” 

“You got me there,” says Lance, and Keith is puzzled by the irritation in his tone until he realizes Lance is talking about his match with Pidge, who has dropped her controller and leaned back on her hands swinging her knees a little side to side and looking very pleased with herself. 

“I sure did,” she says, grinning. “Best two of three?” 

“Definitely.” Lance hasn’t even put his controller down, and waits for her to pick hers up again before apparently starting a rematch. “Anyway -- that makes sense, but as you all can see, I’m occupied, and can’t go ask him, so…?” He trails off, raising his eyebrows, even though he’s still looking determinedly at the screen instead of around at any of them. Keith snorts. 

“You expect someone to go running off to talk to him right now?” he asks derisively. Sometimes, it sure does seem like Lance thinks he runs the world. 

“Uh, I think someone is,” says Hunk, nodding toward the doorway, where Shiro is standing midstep, looking back at the rest of them with his eyebrows raised, as if he paused only when Keith spoke up. 

“Yeah, I’ve got this, guys,” he says. “It seems like I’m the best person to talk to him anyway, considering I’m the --” 

“-- fearless leader, space dad, you speak for the trees, et cetera, et cetera,” says Hunk, nodding as he turns back to his work. 

“Pretty sure I speak for the trees at this point,” Pidge puts in, fingers still moving quickly over her controls, eyes on the screen.

“I was going to say I’m the responsible adult, but fair enough,” Shiro says, shrugging, and turns back to walk out into the hall, presumably to find Coran. 

“Well, okay then,” Keith says softly, and lies down again, since apparently that’s settled. 

--

As they walk into the main hall of the recollection center, Keith has the creeping feeling he’s been here before. It takes him a moment to place it. The decor is different, for one thing: all sleek white couches and light blue accents. But as Coran leads them past several doors with large windows on either side and large signs written in glowing Altean script, it hits him that this place reminds him of the space mall where they found the replacement scaltrite lenses. 

“...it’s changed a bit, of course,” Coran is saying as they make their way down the corridor, navigating around small groups of various humanoid and non-humanoid creatures. Most of them are aliens Keith can’t identify, but he does see a few olkari families, and at one point someone who’s clearly a member of Slav’s species. “But the general principles are the same -- I got in touch with my Unilu contacts and they redirected me to the Venri contingent -- ever since the recollection center split off from the original swap moon, they’ve been in charge of running it here -- and they sent the new coordinates.” 

“So, what is this place exactly? Where are the dogs?” Lance asks, looking around as if puppies might start spilling out of the doorways around them at any moment. 

“It’s not just full of dogs, Lance,” Keith says, shaking his head. “Weren’t you listening when Coran went over all of this? Recollection as in they collect everything living that isn’t where it’s supposed to be and offer it up for trade, like -- like that space mall, apparently, but for things that are like...alive.” 

“Essentially, yes!” Coran says enthusiastically, gesturing around them at the whole of the space as they make their way toward the end of the row of storefronts. “Plants and fungi and animals of all sorts, from various corners of the universe, all collected here for redistribution! Apparently as the swap moon became more commercialized, they needed a space like this, one where some more...specialized shopkeepers could maintain living things. They also seem to have kept its location -- and its mere existence -- under wraps, which is especially good for us. We don’t exactly want to advertise to the empire that we’re active in any area they’re in.”

“If they’re trying to keep organisms alive from all sorts of different environments, they’ll need a lot of energy,” Shiro says. Keith glances over at him to see he’s stopped walking, frowning off into the middle distance. “And yet they’re keeping the place a secret? They must have a quintessence supply that’s off the charts.” 

“Oh, yes,” says Coran, his own step faltering as he turns to reply. “There’s a whole board of managers whose job it is to keep quintessence coming in and keep everything secret.” 

“It’s not that secret, though, if we found out where it is.” 

“I -- well, not everyone has the contacts I have!” Coran finishes with a smile, though Keith thinks there’s definitely something forced in his tone. “Besides, that’s why we’ve got the others back at the castle monitoring things from their end. We should be fine.” Shiro nods slowly, still frowning, and they start making their way toward the end of the corridor again. 

“Should be,” Keith mutters, following at the back of the group. The whole place feels a bit shiftier than it did before. 

--

“How exactly are we supposed to be setting up some kind of animal nursery when we don’t have any idea what kind of thing they’re going to be bringing back?” Hunk’s question echoes through the open air of the room Allura’s led them into. It’s bare, for the most part, easily the size of a small warehouse, with a ceiling just as high. Katie frowns -- that concern echoes the thoughts she’s been having ever since Coran suggested they prepare for the new arrival. Arrival of what? 

“Oh, well, there are things we’ll need no matter what!” Allura says brightly. “And if nothing else, we can start worrying about the basics -- they’ll need light, well, unless they end up with a cave-dweller, and food...unless it’s something that photosynthesizes, in which case we’re back at the light…” She trails off, frowning. “Well, we can start with decor, at least! Pick a color scheme!” Hunk is looking at her blankly, and Katie blinks, realizing she’s doing the same. Shakes it off. 

“We can work on putting together a system with adjustable outputs,” she offers, grinning at a relieved Allura. “It’ll be fun,” she continues, bumping against Hunk’s elbow with her shoulder. “Try to figure out what kind of nutrient combinations we can manage in different states of matter -- Allura, do you have any idea of what kind of thing they’re most likely to bring back? If we have a starting point, we could probably actually manage a number of contingencies for different energy sources, feeding behaviors, oxygenation needs…” Allura nods quickly. 

“I can get you a list, absolutely. I’m sure there are only four or five species Coran would be comfortable with, although there’s no accounting for the others, and of course we don’t know what the center will have --” 

“-- just get us those four or five,” Katie says, looking around the room and trying to imagine how they’ll divide the space. “Hunk, we’re gonna need to start talking construction.” 

--

“As you can see, we have a wide variety of domestic creatures available at the moment, though not many specimens of each.” The Venri staff member leading them through the facility glides across the floor on six neatly-swishing tentacles. She speaks in clean clipped tones, which Keith appreciates for their clarity if nothing else. He’s a bit impressed she can project as loudly as she can considering she barely comes up to his waist, but apparently Venri are small but have mighty lung capacity, or something. In any case, the others seem to be more interested in the fenced-off runs they’re surrounded by, each containing a different sort of creature. 

Some of the enclosures have small ponds, or are small ponds, as in the case of one containing some kind of aquatic animal that looks a lot like a bat, or like a bat would if it were scaled instead of furred, with enormous fins instead of wings. Others of the cages look a lot more like ordinary dog runs -- and, to be fair, others of the creatures look a lot more like ordinary dogs. There’s one like a whippy all-black german shepherd in the corner whose eyes keep emitting some kind of pink smoke in little bursts. In one of the stacked cages for smaller creatures that they pass, right at Keith’s eye level, is a group of labrador retrievers in perfect miniature, so small he could hold three of them in the palm of his hand, emitting little play growls as they wrestle with their fellows. He watches them for a while, wondering what it would be like to have a pocket-sized pup, until he realizes the others are halfway across the row of runs, the Venri indicating various creatures as she continues her pitch. He half-jogs over to rejoin them. 

“Now, did you all have a particular species in mind? If you’d like, you’re welcome to tell me about your living situation -- whatever it may be -- and I can recommend one for you.” She looks around at the four of them expectantly. Keith looks from Coran to Shiro and back again. It’s definitely not his place to take the lead here. But it’s Lance who jumps in. 

“Oh, we’ve got quite a bit of space,” he says airily. “That’s certainly not an issue. We’re hoping to get a puppy who will get along with our cow, maybe give her some companionship, cultivate that interspecies friendship and all that.” The Venri's eyes grow wider and wider as Lance continues. “After all, what’s the point of a dairy cow without a puppy, you know?” 

“A...did you say a dairy cow? Where did you say you’re from again?” 

“We didn’t,” says Shiro, taking a well-placed step so he’s standing between the Venri and Lance. 

“We’re looking for something in the canine category,” says Coran brightly, gesturing toward the row of runs that includes the shadowy german shepherd, now crouching near the front of its run and emitting glittery aqua smoke from its mouth as it looks at them silently with solid black eyes. 

“Do you have a particular biome in mind?” The Venri looks up at him expectantly, holding one thin hand over her tablet, ready to type. 

“Oh, I rather think --” Coran cuts off suddenly, eyes wide and fixed on one of the runs. Keith follows his eyeline and sees a small furry brown shape curled up in the corner, covered in little white speckles. Whatever the creature is, it’s tucked itself firmly against the wall of its enclosure, so he can’t really discern anything about its shape, nor why it seems to have grabbed Coran’s attention so strongly. 

“Coran?” Shiro asks, frowning. Lance, meanwhile, is darting his eyes back and forth between the brown lump and Coran, eyebrows lowered sharply. Keith sees him open his mouth to say something -- probably a strong objection to anyone else getting to pick their puppy -- and knocks into him with his shoulder, muttering a “shush” under his breath. Lance huffs once at him, but shuts his mouth. 

“Is that a white-spotted hyrassie?” Coran breathes quietly after what feels like an eternity of silence.

“Oh, absolutely,” says the Venri, and she’s smiling for the first time since they’ve entered the runs.  

[thewrongexecution]

thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

[evilelitest2]

What are your thoughts on Biden's success with seniors? I'd assumed it was because of COVID, but either Nate Silver or Nate Cohn mentioned that polls indicated that seniors preferred Biden as far back as late last year.

Good Question.  There are several reasons actually first and formost is that Biden is a known quantity to Seniors.  Most Sr either conservative or “Actually conservative but likes to think of themselves as liberal” and so they aren’t threatended by Biden, the most moderate man on the planet.  They hated Hillary for a variety of reasons, but sexism was key among them.  A lot of Seniors.....ok by Seniors I mean white Seniors, don’t like Trump but are also deeply uncomfortable with the rising progressive movement with its idea that maybe they have a lot of racist assumptions they haven’t challenged from their youth.  

Also Biden is their group, he is an old white dude who remembers when American politics “weren’t so radical” and wants to go back to proper American values of not being a massive dick.  He speaks theirs language they relate to their experiences, they see him as one of them.  While Trump is almost as old, his growing up in a rich bubble is alienating to them.  Biden has a life story that relates to a lot of Boomers and he doesn’t threaten them.  Seniors really don’t want to feel like society has moved beyond their understanding of “normal” and Biden is basically saying “only somebody of my demographic can save the day” 

Or another way to put it to this is this.  Seniors want somebody who won’t go after their healthcare but won’t make them feel uncomfortable about their bigotry.  

[srmthfgifs]

Thank you for all the references, I’ve been craving to read more theories / fanfictions in the fandom!! I will definitely save all these to check out later tonight for a good read. 

For Chiro to be a rich kid would make some sense.... 

It makes me so sad that we don’t know much about Shuggazoom’s history. Even in the ‘historical’ “Evil Ages” filler episode, I can’t take any of that history seriously because its all crafted around Earth’s American/European history. It doesn’t reflect Shuggazoom’s history at all. 

Clayton aka Captain Shuggazoom was a billionaire, so Shuggazoom is a capitalist society. 

The “Zone of Wasted Years” aka the Alchemist’s lab upsets me, because its inferred all those years spent building and researching to protect the planet from impending Dark One doom is considered wasted after he becomes Skeleton King... 

The Blasted Lands were a battlefield, depicted a fight between two alien-like races that look nothing alike the Shuggazoomians today. 

Shuggazoom was constructed over a subterranean reservoir, and we later find out that the current Shuggazoomians weren’t even native. They kicked out the people that lived on the land, cursing them to turn into a Shuggazoomian Mer-species that live deep underwater. 

The rest of the Shuggazoom planet is very disturbing. We have witnessed no one live outside of City Limits aside from the Alchemist. The rest of the planet is a dangerous form of uncontrolled jungle, the Skeleton King’s influence being partially responsible. 

Krogayoth and Morlath were imprisoned demons of some sort. Who imprisoned them? Where did they come from? Are they too, dark ones simply sealed away? 

The Arcane Tomb suggests ancient Egyptian-based people that worshipped a king or warriors that had died and were sealed away there, and this was placed near the Alchemist’s Lab. 

The Arcane Isle is the most intriguing. A simple island with the first stone-portal to the ‘netherworld.’ Who built that and why? The Alchemist conjured one in his own lab, but these stones are ancient and isolated. 

Shuggazoom’s planet is already strange. The focus of the population resides in a city so large it can be seen from space, atop the North pole of the planet, no less. Unless its not, since winter seldom reaches the city...perhaps the planet’s axis is tilted weirdly? 

But aside from all that, the amount of different people / alien species that appeared to have been on Shuggazoom is grand in its variety. 

The lack of non-skeleton king created animals is also intriguing. 

The time gaps are difficult too. We don’t know how old the HyperForce really is. They were asleep for quite a long time, and for no given reason. Where did they learn of the ‘chosen one’? Because the Varon Mystic’s High Counselor referred to Chiro as “Even your precious chosen one will be destroyed”, as if to say they weren’t the ones to predict “the chosen one” or didn’t believe in their power...ect... 

There’s only so much we know and while it may not have a huge effect on the story, I still want to know more!!! Three cheers for world building!!! 

[amuelle]

She…

After an endless situation-ship that would flare up and die down like arthritis. She finally decided that old one wasn’t good enough. He had a long tongue but he was everything except loyal, honest or down. Most importantly he didn’t want to be dangerous with her. Her benchmark for affection is the level of danger you are willing to put yourself in for her. The logic was, if you don’t want to throw rocks at my window or stay out past curfew. WHAT ARE WE DOING????

Then she met another man….

She didn’t like him at first. He was not her type nor incredibly attractive. He was however loyal, affectionate, caring and broke. To herself she could admit that she shouldn’t have let it go on for so long knowing how she felt, but vulnerable people do things they wouldn’t normally do. This is how she learnt to stop deciding things with a broken heart.

They were together, the how, who, when and why don’t really matter. Hurt, vulnerable and dealing with all the things that come with feeling like a failure, she met this man. This man who just wanted to give when all she wanted to do was take, so she took. Then as most women do, she started to give and give and ultimately her whole life became a painful penance to making him happy. She knew she was with him but deep down in her soul she felt like this relationship happened around her. She was watching myself go deeper and deeper down the rabbit’s hole and walking further away from herself but it wasn’t her. She didn’t feel like it was her…

He was everything she needed when we they first met. All he wanted to do was be with her, talking for hours and making her feel wanted. Wholly wanted. He was phenomenal and she was drunk off the attention and affection. In the beginning his overly critical nature could be ignored and how he was slowly alienating her from my friends and family. They were just falling in love. Spending all her time with him, she was allowing him to influence her movements but it didn’t seem like an issue. She was watching herself do all these things, it didn’t feel real.

The type of woman who wasn’t shy to help her man. If she had it, she would share it. And who else would she share it with other than her prince? He had encountered some legal trouble so she let him hold something. Then he lost his job and had NO prospects or side hustle and again she offered more financial support. He became a permanent fixture in her monthly budget, right next to roll on and hair spray. At this time a night out meant she footed the bill…it was all on her and he ALWAYS had to come with. It was always wrapped in guilt and it slowly started to develop into a situation where she couldn’t really go out with friends. If she did the night had to end with seeing him or speaking to him because people in love make time for each other.

Every time something good happened for her, the negative effect it had on his life was always the next topic. A friend asked her to be a bridesmaid – she would spend days with other people who weren’t him. Her mother wanted them to go shopping – She should buy him something, she had more than she needed and he had nothing. She had KFC for lunch – How could she eat that KFC alone? Did she stop to think if he had had anything to eat? Everything, simply everything had to be in service to making sure he was alright because he was going through something. She was his woman and that’s what women do for their men…right?

Social media became his primary tool for inciting her anxiety. To keep the peace she untagged herself from photos, unfriended people just to show there was no one else, deleted memories because they made him….not jealous…but insecure. It was laborious. One specific photo taken at a colleagues wedding. Her skin was flawless, hair was did and she looked amazing. He took issue with that photo. He told her to make sure the photo was deleted because it had a man in it and it made her look like a whore. (Whore was his favorite word when he wanted to rake her over the coals). She examined the picture and didn’t see a man. Finally she asked him to show her this man in a photo of her ALONE!!! There, in the top left corner, TINY out of focus and unnoticeable to the naked eye was a man in a black t-shirt…this was the man he was talking about. Not even in focus, or in the photo, they weren’t even touching, he was just walking past in the background when the photo was taken BUT she was a whore for even having this picture. (The bells started ringing but she thought she was being pedantic.) The photo was deleted and she stayed with him and continued to have her spirit chipped away at.

She used to ask herself all the time why she was still with him, haemorrhaging money, pride and happiness. She was set on convincing herself that she wanted to be in this relationship. Before this relationship she had been a very skittish dater.  One thing within six months that made her uncomfortable was enough, she would leave you and never entertain romantic notions of you, but that hadn’t worked for her. She was committed this time to trying something new. You can’t always run….right? She concluded that a half-baked relationship with someone that did not set her soul on fire was better than none at all. A bad boyfriend is a boyfriend. She could go and fit in with everyone in a relationship. Friends would stop ostracising her for not dating because she could be single with no children and be happy at her age. It was impossible. Everyone needs love and you need to be in a relationship, in fact any relationship to get love. You aren’t lonely in a relationship and society will accept you she thought. Better if you are in a relationship (even if it’s bad) because you literally have not a god damn thing to your name. You are ALONE so settle or else you will be SAD AND LONELY….FOREVER!!! (Women suffer and sacrifice in relationships. Men just don’t know better and they need to be taught). Many women dating or single in their 30s have felt this in a variety of ways. It was such a dreadful place to be emotionally and so she ended up settling and doing more damage to herself than just being by herself would do. She thought she was lonely and needed attention. She got it from someone who was trying to kill her from the inside.

Fear was a big part of why she stayed. Most women leave an average of seven times before being able to leave a bad relationship for good. She was afraid of him. She always felt like if she had a good time or did something she enjoyed he could smell it on her and then punish her for finding joy anywhere else except with him. The truth was he didn’t bring her joy. She had a deep sense of obligation to make sure she let him down easy because she didn’t have to keep talking to him and make him fall for her, she could have left him alone from the start, she didn’t have to call him when she was sad, he was in her life because she had asked him to and she had to take the good with the bad…..right? Besides, she was the only person who could help him. He told her that. He needed her and she was high off that even if it was killing her slowly.

When he wasn’t being manipulative or crazy he was a phenomenal support to her but he was crazy more than he was sane. He was always worried about how people perceived him. No one ever saw him be mean or hurtful but he was always awkward when they were in a public setting. He switched to be the nice guy trying to play captain save a hoe. From his perspective he got a lot of bad press from being with her. The onus of his unhappiness rested on her. Never him. From the day they got together she was the reason things didn’t work out in his life and she was responsible for making it better because she had let his image get tainted. People saw him differently because of her. All the negative press he would get because of her affected him. He would say no one took her seriously, all her male friends were just trying to get in her pants and she was naive not to see it. He also used to reiterate that EVERYONE thought she was a whore and he was doing her a favor being with her because no one would want to love her because she was such a whore.

What really used to make her feel like she was the issue was that he would say things like “you are the most important person in my life, why do you treat me so poorly when I love you. All those people who hurt you aren’t me” And he wasn’t wrong. The people responsible for her past hurt had nothing to do with him, that didn’t mean he wasn’t hurting her also. He was protecting her from her whore self. She wasn’t capable to being in a mature relationship and that why she had to stay with him and give everything she had to make their relationship work. He had sacrificed his good name to be with her, she owed him for that.

For his birthday, she took him shopping and then for dinner. He ordered doubles of one the most expensive whiskey on the menu, a steak, shots and whatever else he wanted. It was his birthday and she had offered but she would have appreciated some compassion for her bank balance. Knowing all her financial burdens he continued to have the best night of his life and later when she told him he was unappreciative of the little she was able to do for him he said if its little, its little and he would never pretend what she did for him was more than what it was. Those were the most hurtful words she had ever heard. It was said with the intention of being hurtful and soul crushing and it was. (The bells, sirens and blue lights were going OFF! But she was still not ready to let go and be single again because she had committed to trying to make her relationship work.) Swept up in a tornado that just kept spinning and she had totally forgotten herself. But one day….she remembered

During the course of their relationship she moved to a new city for work. He was happy for her but he couldn’t be happy for her unless he highlighted how desperate his own personal situation was. He was not so happy he couldn’t watch her moves and make her feel guilty about what she did with her time. Since the infancy of the relationship he had always had a way of accusing her of cheating at odd times. She wasn’t cheating. She wanted to give this relationship a chance. Accusing her of cheating and saying incredibly hurtful things was his way of maintaining control. She wanted to be nothing like this hurtful harlot he would describe so she began to change but he was never satisfied. Nothing she ever did was enough. It was her fault his life was not going the way he would have liked it to and she wasn’t doing enough to help him. IT WAS HER FAULT, SHE NEEDED TO FIX IT!!

This particular evening, on a video call he asked her to show him the room she was in. She showed him and he accused her of having a man in the room and he said he wanted to talk to him. That was the instant she reached her quota. For the first time in a long time she wasn’t in the mood. She didn’t want to stay up past midnight dealing with his insecurities reassuring him there was no one else in the room. She had to be up at 5am to get ready for work, today at 9pm she wasn’t doing this! So she slept. In the morning she had close to 100 text messages and 50 missed calls all blaming and accusing her, repeating that she was cruel for what she was doing. When she was finally in the mood to talk he maintained she was cheating. He said the reason she didn’t want to show him the room was because she had a lover laying in the bed with her.

Finally she snapped. It was just as good as taking off your heels after long night or the first few seconds when you hit the water of a bubble bath at exactly the right temperature. That release of all the strain and tension. It was everything she had needed to feel. It felt like she was free! Breaking up with him was tantamount to buying a new life. She didn’t care about being ostracized because she couldn’t keep a man. She didn’t mind friends opting not to meet up with her because their partners were uncomfortable them spending time with single women. It didn’t matter anymore. She was alright having nothing but the clothes on her back, the love in her heart, no dog or cat because she was at peace without him. All the judgement in the world wasn’t worth her peace of mind.

 She is me, this is my story. My peace of mind as I’ve learnt is priceless….

Bisou..bisou

[peakwealth]

Sorella d'Italia

‘The wave of change’. Mobile election billboard, Naples railway station, 2019

Not everyone in Italian politics is crazy, of course not. Enrico Letta, to name one, was prime minister in one of the periodic intervals of moderation. He lasted for less than a year (from 2013 to 2014) and went on to teach at Science Po in Paris. His was a voice of reason and European logic in what he described as 'a world of brutes'.

Things have not improved much, however, and the brutes are doing rather well, in Italy as elsewhere.

As Giorgia Meloni prepared to become presidente del Consiglio in Rome, would it have been improper to ask if Italian voters were more prone to political insanity than others? Or were they just angry and fed up, like voters in the US, in Hungary, in Poland and other places in the grip of populism?

Why is it that so many Italian voters have fallen for the regressive fantasy of garden-variety fascism? Dio, patria, famiglia. Patriarchal faith, tribalism, social conservatism. Everything that the secular, globalized, pluralistic European consensus is or was not.

How could they vote again for Forza Italia, still led by Silvio Berlusconi, a political dinosaur straight out of the wax museum? The easy assumption is that Italians themselves weren't really to blame, that they were duped or bamboozled or frightened into voting hard right. Or that the blame should go, once more, to the decivilizing effect of social media, to the wanton ignorance of the 21st century, to the alienation brought about by confusing times.

The stratification of Western societies into upper and lower classes continues. Although income 'disparities' keep getting more grotesque, the lower classes (one hesitates to use such loaded words) aren't necessarily poor economically. The poverty they share is multidimensional, one of emotion, entertainment, unvarnished beliefs and personal certainties - impervious to the reason and knowledge of the pointy-nosed elites.

But in the end Europe would not be sliding towards right wing authoritarianism if enough voters hadn't ticked those boxes. They bear at least some of the (democratic) responsibility for the unfolding tragedy that is dissolving liberal, open societies from Germany to Slovenia, and from Sweden to Spain, not to mention Russia.

It is indelicate to recall that Benito Mussolini ended up hanging upside down from a metal beam in a petrol station in Milan? It has been 77 years since Mussolini's death but the picture remains evocative. The memory hasn't faded. Or it shouldn't have.

[theharellan]

RP POSITIVITY MEME

DAY 14: FREE DAY!

so this whole week i’ve kept myself from mentioning joly when possible. i promo joly on my dash every day. my very existence is a joly promo. it was mostly a way to make sure that i gave other people attention, and also b/c i saw the last day was a free day and wanted to use it to write about how much i love joly’s characters.

if it weren’t for joly i doubt i’d still be here. that’s not to say that i didn’t love rping solas beyond what i have with joly, but after my hiatus it was the desire to rp with joly again that really brought me back. and i’m so thankful for that b/c it’s allowed me to meet ppl like merc and lisa and kae, ppl who either weren’t around or i didn’t know before. also just when i was having a rough time last year and whenever i’ve had a rough time since then joly’s been there for me. they’re a really special person, who deserves even more kind words written about them than their characters do. but if i keep going i’ll probably make myself cry.

suffice to say if you like my blog, then you have joly to thank. not just for me being here, but how their ocs have shaped my solas. i cannot recommend joly’s blogs enough. they don’t have as much time as they did to write, but it doesn’t make them any less dedicated to their characters as someone who posts a dozen things a day.

before i get to their actual blogs, i want to talk about the npcs or characters that no longer have rp blogs.

first, deshanna. i’ve loved how they made a mother who is flawed and sympathetic, and who i don’t feel 100% good about solas disliking her in modern. it’s my secret desire to be able to rp in a thread where she’s npc’d one day, either in modern or batb. next, layne. what a piece of shit. i don’t know TOO much about layne, and i’m in this position where i want to know more but also i dread it. hoping one day solas and mio can shank him. and then, june. june had a blog (and may again one day??) and he was a fuckin hermit mamma’s boy that was too boring for fen to want to have anything to do with. joly’s recently been toying with some ideas for his character that i think only strengthen what they have, and i’m excited.

@ancientimpudence -

mio is petty. mio is mean. mio is stand-offish. mio is loyal. mio is driven. mio is honest. i love mio.

if you want a character who is flawed and not always nice, you’ll love mio. they’re a really good example of how you can make a character not always be a very pleasant person, but still get plenty of rp mileage off of them and develop meaningful relationships. how two characters’ relationship can somehow be incredibly deep and yet broken. i love what joly and i have built for mio and solas, two ancient friends who aren’t always the best friends.

i could really talk about about their relationship. solas goes through a period where he becomes very empathetic and in-tune with the problems of everyone around him, but mio’s somehow always escape him. i love the gap, and i love how it’s both not his fault b/c mio hides how they feel, but also he needs to do better by them. i love how mio wants what’s best for solas and their cause, while simultaneously suggesting things that actually wouldn’t be best for solas, because mio isn’t omnipotent and is also, to an extent, still trying to keep solas as he was.

i love how mio doesn’t like ian but is still there to help him. i love how mio expresses themself in ways not everyone understands. i love how modern mio has purse dogs and brings vher food b/c they spent all weekend playing the sims.

and vher / mio?? one of those ships that just kinda happened. one of the best things about talking to joly about characters is how often two just kinda cling to one another. vher is aro and can’t return the romantic feelings mio feels for them (and open enough to be accepting when mio finds romantic love elsewhere) but they still care for mio so much. everything about mio that i listed above, even the petty and vain stuff, vher loves. also sometims vher decides they wanna kiss mio and i can only imagine what it does to the poor child.

basically, what i’m getting at here is, joly lets mio be flawed but also shows how those flaws can still lead to positive interactions. joly lets mio be unadmirable at times, but still likeable and lovable. joly introduced some extra diversity in background to the rebellion and i’m eternally thankful tbh.

@betterthanmaps​ -

harding is one of those characters everyone adores, and so it makes sense that joly, one of the most adorable ppl on the planet, chose to write her. i love seeing characters with stable and normal backstories. harding is just such a steady influence, and i’ve loved seeing her contrasted with the sad backstories most canons and ocs possess. which i wanna be clear isn’t a criticism of sad backstories! i merely mean that it’s also nice seeing variety. not everyone has had a past that has made them cruel or kind, some people were raised by caring parents and lived simple lives until they heard the call to adventure. those people are just as interesting and worthy of telling stories about.

joly’s harding reminds me somewhat of tolkien’s hobbits, i suppose, now that i’m writing this out. and they’re some of my fave characters in literature. only w/ harding we also get fun dragon age dwarfy lore-- someone who is as un-dwarfy as varric but not quite so loud about it and we get actual queer representation.

@spiritualjourneys​ - 

i adore spirits? i do not adore how the fandom treats spirits. things like treating human cole as superior to spirit cole, rather than a person making different choices, both paths making them happy, even if one is for reasons we can’t all understand. pinning everything wrong with anders in da2 on justice. assuming lord woolsey, an innocent spirit-ram who has done nothing but help, has always been a rage demon (even tho the ways in which he has been shown to help the family that adopted him aren’t typical rage-related qualities) but ANYWAY.

the point is, spirits are given something of a raw deal by the fandom and are almost always judged by their ability to conform to human standards. joly’s spirit multi is fuckin fantastic and making spirits different and complex and alien, while also familiar and very much people rather than set pieces in the stories of others. though all of them started out as npcs created by either joly (love, sincerity), myself (joy), or bioware (wisdom) it took joly no time at all to establish their stories. love and joy especially...

what i appreciate about love is the path they took to get where they are. how they weren’t always love, how they focus upon a specific kind of love, how they can’t always see when love is best working past. though i’ve only just started rping peace, i’m in love (get it) with the dynamic the two of them have formed. how they balance one another out and keep one another from straying too far into their own interests, and thereby corrupting themselves. it’s a dynamic that i wasn’t expecting at all when i made peace as an au to my zenyatta blog, but i think that’s the amazing thing about writing with joly. something falls into place and then it grabs you and the idea just won’t let go.

and as for joy, it’s probably the least developed of the spirits, having no form that’s recognisably alive nevermind a person. but it demonstrates well, i think, how “humanity” in elvhenan wasn’t defined by shape. when solas says he dislikes when people see him as just a pair of pointed ears, and that he doesn’t necessarily identify much with modern elves, the idea is expressing multiple things. one of them, i think, is that being an elf sometimes meant being a physical body with pointed ears, but sometimes you could just be bubbles and you’d still be considered a valid member of elvhen society. joy doesn’t exist as we do. joy forgets, joy prefers to never touch the earth, and it exists in a state of cycles to keep itself from becoming something like despair. joly depicts the beauty and the drawbacks of existing in this state and i’m just??? so glad they decided to write joy. b/c they do it more justice than i ever could.

@paragoninexile -

tam’s new blog isn’t fully set up but i wanna talk about her anyway. tam is a good hero and a good person, and in many ways sort of made to be a hero. when i found out about tam i was rly excited simply b/c she was very much like my warden, only with so much more care and thought put into her that now she’s basically replaced my canon warden in my heart.

i think my favourite thing about tam is how much of a front she puts up for everyone. crowning bhelen, even if it meant the death of another father figure. recruiting loghain, even if it meant losing her friend or possibly lover. it shows that even neutral good heroes still have to make decisions that could be considered ruthlessly practical. bhelen is not necessarily the better choice morally, especially not as an aeducan (especially especially not as an aeducan who doesn’t kill trian). i imagine tam knows that crowning him will have dire consequences not just for harrowmont, but the entire harrowmont line. she does it anyway, not because she wants to, but because for orzammar it’s the best choice.

i’ve loved finally having a chance to write one of my fave dragon age ships: gorim/aeducan. i have a weakness for ships who have been together since they were only young, and the progression they take in the au is so good?? being able to find freedom for their love in a life that is literally killing tamar, and the reason they only get 12 or so happy years together rather than 50. but tam is so good that i’m honestly proud to be able to give her those twelve years with gorim. one day i’m gonna make joly hurt w/ thoughts about the kid gorim adopts after tam dies and who he tells them all about. 8)

@cadashsmash -

cadri i think was the first joly character i interacted with, though i believe i remember ian from way way back when i tried rping merrill and couldn’t quite get a foothold like i did with solas and thora.

i’m in love with dwarves u all should know this, so ofc i’m in love with cadri. i love how rough around the edges she is, how she tries to do the right thing, and how doing so can lead to some messed up shit like killing abelas. the work joly’s done with reaver lore is perfect, working with how dirty and raw the specialisation is without making it too hardcore for an inquisitor to ever hope to specialise in it (stop assuming all reavers are cannibals fandom smh). one of my fave threads on thora continues to be the post-battle thread where both are recovering from the drawbacks of their own specialisations and clash because of them. it’s just a really unique idea that is what makes writing with joly so... rounded? like i’m never just writing one thing with joly. they push me as a writer in the best possible way.

overall cadri is just a rly excellent character who, like tam and harding, do credit to dwarves that the series doesn’t always. i’ve loved exploring how differently her and thora react to their position in life, i’ve loved seeing cadri’s anger or indifference towards dwarven society. it’s so valid and realistic and good. i’ve loved exploring the specific ways in which she bucks the presumptions solas has about dwarves, how even in universes where she’s not inquisitor her individuality is still nothing he expects from her kind and how she changes him anyway. i also will always be fond of this being their friendship song.

cadri: hey solas, what d’you call a flower before it opens? solas: a bud. cadri: I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BUD. solas: UGHH.

@dalishfreckles -

it’s really hard to not write a post just about ian, honestly. all of joly’s characters are special to me, but i won’t deny ian is my favourite and has a very important place in my heart. if i were to truthfully answer those top 5 fave characters questions, ian would be on there no question.

as someone who goes through some of the same struggles as ian, he’s inspirational. seeing him struggle to keep surviving, to keep loving, to keep helping even when everything inside him is screaming to stop. i love seeing him make mistakes, honest ones or ones born of anxiety. b/c anxiety is more than just hating yourself or having trouble talking to people, although that is very real. sometimes anxiety can cause you to project some really terrible things onto people, things that aren’t really fair to them.

when i see ian doing things like... projecting his own feelings of worthlessness onto solas, assuming he must think the same rather than giving solas a chance to explain? it’s realistic, and it’s not good. it’s trying to pull people into the same destructive game you do to yourself. it’s also realistic, esp since in the thread i’m referring to solas fucked up and has shit to apologise for. idk, it’s just really comforting to see ian pull the same shit that i do, but knowing he’s still a good person and that i love him is an act of self love.

ian’s an important character for so many reasons, that i could probably write a 20 page thesis on him and his development / how much he means to me. i’m proud of him so much. i’m proud when he finds the strength to tease solas, i’m proud when he stands up for himself, even when he’s standing up against the people he loves. especially when, tbh. how as he grows he can see inara’s faults but doesn’t hate her for them, and tries to help her, when he’s under no obligation to. how he still tries to connect with solas after solas coldly brushes him off the first time ian admonishes him. and i love how joly shows it’s not easy. none of it is. and that ian has to keep choosing to be good, it makes everything he does that much more meaningful.

finally, ian isn’t a hero, necessarily. he’s not the sort of person people tell stories about, which is one reason i love the solas/ian pairing so much. it’s really all about the person for solas, and ian is just so much about what solas loves about people. it’s not always about battles and heroes, sometimes it’s just about a person who has the patience and love in them to make a tree grow in the middle of a desert alienage. sometimes the most wonderful things about people are the little, radical things they do for themselves and those they love rather than how they change the world.

this has gotten to be very long, and probably rambling, but to be fair to me this is like two weeks of joly-positivity i’ve been holding in.

i’ll probably be doing one more free day tomorrow, even if today is the last day, just to do a v general positive post for those i follow. but i wanted to take at least one day to credit the person who has inspired me with their words and characters. like. this was just their characters? i didn’t even get a chance to go into the ways joly’s prose shines, how it’s descriptive and yet never difficult to comprehend. how many different types of plots they’re here for.

but to make a long story short, joly is an incredibly talented writer. i’ve said this before, but i can look back on things i’ve written years ago with joly and still like what i wrote (as well as what they wrote but that should go w/o saying), which is a rare feeling, simply b/c joly lets me access the best writer in me. we often here in the rpc use “muse” as a shorthand for “character we write that inspires us” and i’ve found it a difficult word to rly use-- simply b/c joly and their characters are as much my muses as my own characters. at least in the sense that thinking about them inspires me to write.

tl;dr- pls follow and write with joly. b/c the only thing i love as much as writing with joly is reading what they write with other people.

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Behind The Album: Broken

In September 1992, Nine Inch Nails released its first extended play or EP through TVT Records. This acted as the follow up to Pretty Hate Machine released three years previously. The record saw the band change from a heavily infused synth pop sound to a much heavier metal sound. After the success of Pretty Hate Machine, TVT Records put heavy pressure on Reznor to create a similar album with singles the label could release. CEO Steve Gottlieb stuck his heels in the ground and insisted that Reznor release something just like Pretty Hate Machine or they would not release it. The singer resisted and asked the TVT to terminate his contract citing restrictions on his creative control, but the record company refused. He then fought with the label over their ongoing interference with every part of his intellectual property or his music. Throughout this project, Reznor called it a wide variety of things in order to avoid any legal issues with TVT Records. For this reason, the EP was recorded in six different studios in a variety of places. In the end, Trent was eventually released from his contract allowing him to sign with Interscope Records. He would say this about the entire situation. “We made it very clear we were not doing another record for TVT. But they made it pretty clear they weren't ready to sell. So I felt like, well, I've finally got this thing going but it's dead. Flood and I had to record Broken under a different band name, because if TVT found out we were recording, they could confiscate all our shit and release it. Jimmy Iovine got involved with Interscope, and we kind of got slave-traded. It wasn't my doing. I didn't know anything about Interscope. And I was real pissed off at him at first because it was going from one bad situation to potentially another one…”

As recording began, the Nine Inch Nails front man brought in Flood once again to work on “Wish,” “Last,” and “Gave Up.” He would use a number of pseudonyms when working on this project, so the executives at TVT Records were none the wiser. Looking back, he had this to say about the sound he was going for on the record. “Broken [...] had a lot of the super-thick chunk sound, and almost every guitar sound on that record was [tapes consisting of] me playing through an old Zoom pedal and then going direct into Digidesign's TurboSynth [software in a Macintosh computer]. Then I used a couple of key ingredients to make it [be heard as being] unlike any 'real' sound." Reznor’s’s dog Masie also participated on it as he used his dog’s barking and a recorded moment when the canine bit engineer Sean Beavan on the track “Physical.” One can hear the engineer yell “owww” Sadly, the dog would die three years later during The Self-Destruct tour after a fall from a balcony. Recording took place all over the country in studios in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Miami. In September 1992, he took the finished record to Interscope Records, which they accepted as the first release from their label.

Broken has a much heavier sound, which comes from a strong influence inspired by bands like Ministry and Godflesh. These groups were seen as the major contributors to industrial metal at the time. Reznor would say that his hope for the listener was to “make their ears a little scratchy” with the music. The lyrics take aim at society at large with many references to alienation, angst, and struggles over being dependent on society, while at the same time controlled by it. Broken also saw Reznor start to use profanity selectively as heard in“Wish” where he uses f*** three times throughout the course of the song. He would use a couple of samples on the album that never got credited including David Bowie’s “It’s No Game” and the film, The Empire Strikes Back. You really could not get away with that in today’s music world and commercially release it. For most CD copies of the EP, Reznor included 91 one second silent tracks followed by two bonus tracks including the song “Physical” originally recorded by Adam Ant. In 1995, the singer would perform the track live with Ant on two consecutive nights. On the second night, Ant thanked Reznor for allowing him to sing with “the best fucking band in the world.” The other bonus track came in the song “Suck”, which Reznor had sung on a year earlier for the band, Pigface. This version was radically different than the original in tempo and feel.

Critical reception to Broken remained mostly positive with most critics noting the major change to an industrial metal heaviness. Danny Scott writing for Select had this to say about it. “It’s loud and it'll rip your stinkin' head from your shoulders if you so much as breathe without permission." New Musical Express noted that Reznor was no longer following any other band, but instead had carved out his own unique niche within the genre. Peter Kane of Q observed that the drums represented the equivalent of going to the dentist. The Baltimore Sun Review stated that Broken was “everything industrial music should be.” Making Music probably said it best when they wrote, “It’s an intensely vicious and shocking 30 minutes.” The EP would go on to be certified platinum in 1992, despite the fact that Nine Inch Nails offered up no tour to support it. The first single came in the song “Happiness in Slavery,” which included a very explicit video, where performance artist Bob Flanagan could be seen being eventually raped and killed through the course of the music. MTV banned it outright, which significantly slowed the popularity of the single. For the second single “Wish,” Reznor produced a video that merely acted as a live show clip. He would go on to win a Grammy for the song for Best Metal Performance. He would later say in a joke about his grave. “Reznor: Died. Said 'Fist Fuck', Won a Grammy." The video for “Happiness in Slavery” did air a few times successfully despite being banned around the world. One program called Raw Time represented a public access show in Austin, Texas, who would air it at 3 AM one morning to a mostly positive reaction. A film by the same name Broken would be released personally through Trent Reznor, but not commercially because he did not want it to be confused with the EP. This movie shall be looked at later in this book in the article on the videography and films of Nine Inch Nails.

[idolizerp]

[ LOADING INFORMATION ON OLYMPUS’ LEAD RAP, SUB VOCAL JUNE…. ]

DETAILS

CURRENT AGE: 26 DEBUT AGE: 18 SKILL POINTS: 10 VOCAL | 07 DANCE | 10 RAP | 13 PERFORMANCE

INTERVIEW

Somewhere between scribbles of organic formulas and sloppy syllables of chemistry notes the words ‘’chain reaction’’ were written in midst of yellow highlighter. Had Junhai opened his notes, the road he’d gone through would have made much more sense. The simplicity of lacking in a skill crucial for his environment – the Korean language – had Midas media giving the boy on the edge of debut orders in the delicate form of advice. If you don’t know how to say it, don’t talk at all. Such simple words helped him make a conscious decision of sinking his teeth into his tongue, no matter how much it wanted to cut loose. It formed a whole delusion around the young man right from the start of his career. Unapologetically held eye-contact with ones hovering at the tip of his nose, foot gently swinging on top of the other, shoulders back and a tilted smile pulling up the corners of stained lips mixed well with overall soft features into a mirage of a foreign prince or at the very least – a well-mannered diplomat. Staying relatively quiet until pushed to talk did him justice, short and sweet answers to questions received the perfect amount of minimum to keep Olympians happy.

“You seem soft,” was an implication Junhai often received in fansigns in various shapes and forms. For a moment the answer was replaced with the idol leaning forward, nimble fingers catching the lukewarm digits of a fan and placing their palm right on top of his neatly styled hair. “Am I?” An unnecessary plead of confirmation and a simultaneous offer of freedom for the fan. Bait witch was always taken whether it was a loving pet or a slightly uncomfortable attempt to collect DNA samples for possible cloning in the future, a collection of similar occurrences easily found and compiled in fan videos along with titles of ‘ June poking fans’ cheeks’ and ‘ June making fans blush for five minutes straight’.

There was no spite for Junhai to act the way he had in front of the masses of fans of Olympus. No hidden agenda, other than compensation for a lack of words he desperately wanted to say but was forbidden to. That’s how idols act, right? Well, no, as interviewers questioned his intentions for the sake of variety, to which the young man could only respond that he loved Olympians very much – the only politically correct response in the idol chaos.

Lack of words spoken could have been his greatest strength, hadn’t it been his greatest weakness, leaving him defenseless. ‘If it’s not scripted, you don’t say it’ was an imposed motto, his overall considerate and diplomatic nature chained up and drowned for at least eight years in front of the masses. The inappropriate level of fanservice he caught up to too late to take back gathered loyal fans along with stable saesangs, because of whom June was swept into situations he later couldn’t explain himself for due to the image that had been created – the too accessible prince who can be shared by all. It’s not like he would ever refuse it, only we are in his heart, he loves us too much, they claimed who he was right to June’s face, the ten year contract a heavy weight, making him nod his head and taste blood in his mouth. The man became property in the socialist society of the ones that claimed to be their fans as he kept on smiling warmly at his friends behind closed doors “I’m fine, really. Let’s talk about you.“

BIOGRAPHY

i. Junhai’s father wholeheartedly believed that the reason his son was average is due to the blood that ran in their offspring’s veins. One couldn’t expect someone related to middle ground to become spectacular – June didn‘t have the genes for that, having born into a family of two middle children with boring lives they chose to carry in Guangzhou, China.

Whether it was a placebo effect or not, Junhai was simply average at everything he’d ever chosen to do. He tried soccer, but he only became a professional bench boy. Wood warmer, they called him, as he wasn’t fast enough or sharp enough to join other players on the field. Fencing was thrilling. At least for those who managed to skillfully hit targets and gather points. Not Junhai, unfortunately. He came across drawing, yet no matter how many pencils he used up, there was always someone around him who shaded better and drew better proportions by the rule of the thumb. He was never a top student either, ‘Li Junhai’ always resting somewhere in the middle of a long list after class evaluations. Popularity didn’t mold with him, too, eyes often shifting to his athletic friends or the publicly notorious outcasts he exchanged small talk with. Attention was never on him, it slipped past the boy and lurked around the manifestation of a bare minimum of a personality. It was was almost beyond belief how Junhai had passed the Midas Media audition with a score above average, believing that maybe he had finally found something he wasn’t just ’alright’ at.

ii. “At this point you’re either good, or they will make you good, kid,” was something he heard once he stepped onto the foreign land. Yet, the first year in Korea was a blur of syllables and noises the thirteen year old desperately tried to make sense of as his tongue twisted and turned in failed attempts to communicate with those around him. It was a proper inconvenience to his roommate, who ended up nursing a preteen with the intellectual capacity of a toddler. Or so it seemed, as any reminder of a practice or invitation to a meal was greeted with a pair of knitted eyebrows and Cantonese mutters, while hours dedicated to sleep were disturbed by the foreigner trying to read his Hangul schedule into a translator.

Time was powerful – lesson learned after a proper amount of time and double the amount of effort. Words directed at him didn’t sound like white noise. Hangul wasn’t just scribbles. Messages came through without any interruption. It evolved into Junhai repeating the sentences directed at him in an attempt to form variations in his head which were later verbalized as he tried to communicate like a functioning human should. It was hilarious, the way he spoke without knowing proper words or diction, the base of his sentences formed only by an overall structural understanding. Scissors became sharp cut sticks and toothpicks were sharp mini wood sticks. The sweet combination of mispronunciation along with a relatively limited vocabulary won over some snickers around the company. Had he known the good-nature of the laugh he drew, maybe his stomach would have stopped sinking whenever people expected words coming out of his mouth.

iii. Understanding the language unlocked a new level of comfort and security. The small room he lived in didn’t seem so alien, the streets weren’t that bewildering and the features his eyes stuck upon weren’t uninviting anymore. The mundane life of a trainee caught up to the teenager quicker than one would expect. Yet, no complains or hints of exhaustion were ever heard from the boy. On the contrary, Junhai reached out for ‘above average’ right when making sense of his own schedule and duties allowed him to put his all into training. But overtime could not save a boy of an unclear focus.

“What am I?”

No one ever told Junhai what they were planning for him, training hours marked no certain direction either. You hit that note? Good. You learned that choreography? Good. Your tongue didn’t twist while rapping? Good. Yet, in comparison to others around him, he lacked a spotlight skill and no one had any intention of giving him one. Therefore, his training felt loose and messy. While he did give his whole to train the modest amount of talent he had naturally, lack of a clear path distributed his energy in a way that didn’t allow Junhai to reach the level of skill he wanted. “You’re good. Not great, not special or spectacular. Just good.”

An alright vocalist, an alright rapper, a decent dancer. That was it, he was just.. Good. Not a step over, not a step below.

iv. For someone labeled as average, Junhai wasn’t sure why it was that he belonged in the lineup for Olympus. Charms that he might have had were useless due to how exchangeable he felt, many stronger contenders left lining up behind his back. It only came to him later, that he was just as much interchangeable and that’s why he was wanted. To be the middle ground that fills in the gaps - lines that were too unimportant to belong to main members of the group. A member can sing it better? June, do an ad-lib. Another member can rap better? June, take the background vocal. From multiple well-tailored lines in the subunit he debuted in his position switched to a few bars and maybe some lines if the producer felt generous. Never more, just enough to fill in spaces.

Junhai felt like he was a background member, not important enough to take much lead, not unimportant enough to be kept in the shadows. His members were talent and he was.. There. The feeling of low importance molded the barely existing relationship with the Olympus members. He never held it against them either. It’s my problem, he told himself, I can’t offer much. Therefore, decisions in which the members took part in slipped past his ears and if not the few fans he gathered offering himself to them due by stares and dimpled smiles, maybe no one would really notice if he had been dropped.

v. He really didn’t like being quiet, barely shutting up behind closed doors. His friends could only laugh about it, of course you have a lot to say after bottling your voice up. Yet, the ten year contract hung heavy on his neck like a chain. A bobble-head, well controlled by Midas media. One that got used to the slow attempted homicide of his own character. He wasn’t even that mad anymore, relying on charms and foreign mysteries to keep himself afloat in midst of the talented group. So much that people following Junhai start to seem mundane. There weren’t any ways to object the generous public figure he himself created. They followed him on stage, they followed him abroad, snuck into bathrooms and left presents at his doorstep. And when a number of Olympus fans kept themselves in tact, there was no getting away from the ones that didn’t. After all, he was public property even at the point when forceful pull of an open-hearted fan managed to dislocate his shoulder.

Olympus’ Junhai minor injury practicing; Olympus wrap up ‘Tell me’ promotions as five.

Minor. Did all minor injuries take more than a few months to heal? Midas knows best.

vi. Sometimes his modestly sized friend group worried about the lack of a fitting reaction for being mistreated. June never got mad, never cried or showed signs of distress about it. A dimple appeared on his cheek whenever questioned, as he beamed brightly at his company. “It’s my job, I’m used to it. No big deal.”

Junhai never lied to his friends. Unless the topic was his career.

vii. Guangzhou missed him, or so his mother told him whenever he Skype-called his family whom he hadn’t visited in years. How were his friends doing? That one’s married, that one became a surgeon, the other one has three children already. What he’d done in eight years? Really didn’t feel like much. He became an average member of a boy group in Korea with some lines and screen time. Somewhat liked, somewhat disliked. Needed, but not to the point of survival.

“I don’t think I will continue,” he admits time and time again into the glossy faces of his parents on the screen. “When the contract ends, I mean. We have over two years, the members will likely be planning their military service. And I’m not good enough to be a soloist.” It’s nice to talk in Cantonese again, he notes to himself. “I don’t think I belong here.”

As his mother kept howling into the microphone, he could hear his father murmur the same truth he’s been telling right from the start - mediocre people can’t escape their genetics.

[feynites]

(1/2) omg I have to tell you that I just came across your tumblr post about "Evil Chancellor Traytor" & it made me laugh so hard and reminded me so much of my own childhood in which me & my sister had all kinds of elaborate characters for our society of toys (including one of my mom's old Barbies from the 60's whose hands had been chewed by mice in my grandmother's attic) & my little brother also used to follow our stories-anyway the point is! What you wrote was hilarious & I would totally...

(2/2) ... read more tales from your society of childhood toys! It was hilarious and awesome! Also you seem really cool! Ok that is all! :)

-

Thank you!! X3

Having siblings you get along with seems to be a real boon on this front, it seems - lots of energy to bounce off of, and someone to consistently share and re-tell all the stories with. 

We played a ton of games, although probably none as easily summarized in an entertaining short story as Evil Chancellor Traytor. But. Lemme see... uhm... oh! Okay, we can try the story of the king who was friends with him. King Bazooka.

To begin, we’ll need context. One of the major sources of toys when my siblings and I were a bit younger was the local convenience store (which my dad ran... into the ground). But, while it was around, it had a selection of cheap plastic action figures. Which we could acquire at-cost, and so, we had plenty of them ourselves. This is where we got our cheap Power Rangers knock-off toys (one of which would eventually become the king mentioned in Traytor’s story).

For reference, they looked like this:

There were a few basic models, all of them very ripped, in a variety of colours ranging from the above yellow and red, to blue and pink and white and black and so on and so forth. Their limbs could move and their knees could bend, and their feet and hands could also be rearranged to some extent (I think, maybe not the hands) but they weren’t exactly durable, so their limbs popped off pretty regularly.

Anyway, we had a veritable army of these toys, but also something of a problem with them at first. See, my sister and I were both girls, but none of the models for these toys came with the usual, y’know, curvy boob-and-hips figure that would typically denote them as women. There were pink ones, and of course we were well familiar with the concept that pink = girl, but the pink Ranger Warriors were also savagely ripped. But we didn’t want to have an army of all boys, how would we apply our usual range of soap opera cliches? Who would get unexpectedly pregnant or engaged? In space?

The solution came by way of a library book about female body building, that I had semi-recently discovered and quickly recollected. I, in all my worldly older sister glory, asserted that these toys were totally capable of being women, they were just really muscular women. Skepticism was expressed by my younger brother and sister. The Book was called for. A magazine was acquired instead. Images were found of ripped lady body builders, and scrutinized for accuracy.

Skepticism was retracted. It was agreed that this solution worked, and that, in the tradition set before us by the Power Rangers television show, all pink and yellow versions of the toys (and any others we considered suitably effeminate for some reason or another, but definitely those ones) were The Girl Ones. Dilemma resolved, we immediately set about playing with them, of course, and constructing stories around them and incorporating them into our existing populace of toys. We discovered some neat stuff about these action figures. One was that their hands could hold onto stuff pretty well, and were quite suited to dangling them off of lines and chords and the attachments for blinds and tying them to strings and whipping them around like helicopters. ‘Space exploration’ required a lot of this. Of course, this also meant that our most intrepid heroes tended to be the ones who suffered injuries like ‘lost thumb’, and ‘severed limb’, and ‘complete dismemberment’. 

Most of the time, though, when something broke, it could be popped back into place. Thumbs, torsos, and heads were the general exception to this, I seem to recall. But every so often the ball that locked into the socket for a limb’s joint would also break, rather than just popping loose, and then the only hope was glue (which would reattach the limb, but also result in ‘mobility issues’ where it couldn’t move around at all).

So... in essence, we had an army of space-faring disabled gender non-conforming lady bodybuilders, and their brothers/husbands/boyfriends/etc, protecting the universe. We developed ridiculously deep attachments to some of these toys, with all their wonky limbs and wobbly knees and scratched paint, and we’d do our best to keep them away from the dog (but the dog didn’t go for them too often, because the plastic was too hard), and also any adults who might throw them away.

Eventually, though, the convenience store closed, and we no longer had easy access to new Ranger Warriors, or even the option of replacing ones who got too damaged to keep playing with. So my sister and I determined that it was time for our space adventurers to retire. No more whipping them down staircases or tying them to fan blades. They became Space Veterans, who would walk among the populace of other toys, and recount gruesome war stories and endure PTSD flashbacks and sometimes sit outside the tavern, drinking and looking up at the stars. Wistful, but by and large also resigned to the fact that their space exploration days were done, and they had other things to do. Quieter lives to get on with.

All but one.

Bazooka.

See, each Ranger Warrior was named after some kind of weapon. Names ranged from the creatively-dubbed ‘Gun’, to stuff like ‘Scythe’ or ‘Artillery’. The last Ranger Warrior we got before the store went under was a red and silver one, and by then most of the standard names were taken, so we dubbed him ‘Bazooka’. With a name like that, it was possibly inevitable that he was kind of an over-dramatic hothead.

But Bazooka had no battle scars, no lost or broken limbs. He had barely gotten a chance to fight in the Space Wars before his unit was recalled, and the peace treaties were signed. His older sister had a medal of Highest Honours, and had lost mobility in both of her arms, and could tell tall tales about the days when her unit would wade through alien wilds on daring missions. Bazooka was still pretty fresh. Signing up was supposed to be his chance for glory, his chance to prove himself! But instead, he had been washed out with all the old-timers, too.

Even though our space heroes might have retired, though, not all of their enemies did. One of the treaties signed granted an embassy to the Happy Meal Barbies. Twin sisters, forever rooted in place against plastic stands, with eerily off-model eyes. One of them had a bicycle prop, but neither of them could actually move off of their stands, because they were actually alien shapeshifters who had... misunderstood some images of humans, before they ‘locked in’ their final forms and found themselves stuck with them. So one just had this bike, fused to her, that she never rode, and that was technically part of her body. The other I don’t recollect as vividly.

Anyway, they were evil, like genuinely to the bone evil, but also sometimes sympathetic because one of them was part bike. And so of course when the dog claimed the old king, they hatched a scheme to become the Queens of Action Figure Dystopia.

The details of that particular adventure are lost to the sands of time. What is known, though, is that it involved a lot of hexes, and a giant purple marble called The Esper, and when all was said and done the twins only managed to be queens for a short period of time before they were overthrown. In a scene ripped straight from The Transformers Movie (the old cartoon one, not the Michael Bay stuff that was nowhere to be seen yet), Bazooka touched The Esper and ended up becoming the next king by way of ancient whatsits and magical such-and-such, regardless of his appalling lack of actual qualifications. All hail the new king!

He sucked at it. For a long time. The theme of ‘Bazooka has no goddamn idea what he’s doing’ was a pretty substantial one, in my memory, but it probably only lasted for a few days before he started getting his shit in gear and tried to solve problems with methods that did not require explosives. And he earned the friendship of his Evil Chancellor, who he would come to trust above all others and would not stand to hear besmirched (of course, to most other people’s eyes, this just looked like a resilient strain of his incompetence, and general opinion was that Bazooka was well-meaning-but-dim, and Evil Chancellor Traytor was... well... evil).

By the time Traytor died, Bazooka was among the last of the remaining Ranger Warriors. Many had been thrown out by then, culled in an effort to curtail our childish messes because, of course, nearly all of them were visibly broken in some way. Others had been misplaced or destroyed in any number of ways. Bazooka’s sister was long gone, and so were my two favourites, and pretty much it was just down to the king, who had grown weary even if his parts still moved and his armour was unscratched. The deaths of so many of his friends and loved ones weighed upon him. In his way, he had always been separate from them, always straddled a divide as someone not quite a veteran, not quite a hero, not quite a politician. He never really achieved any of the greatness he sought. Only the wisdom to realize that this greatness had probably never existed in the first place.

When he buried himself in Traytor’s name, it was, in many respects, the final chapter of the space heroes’ saga. In the end, few of them met happy fates. But while they were around, they witnessed the cosmos from the edge of spinning fan blades, and got possessed by alien brain worms who made them try to drown their best friends in the kitchen sink, and found out that they were secretly half snake alien and had mental breakdowns over it, and maintained orbital facilities in obscure parts of space where the only company they had for months at a time was the voice on the other side of a quantum transmission, and even became royalty (a few times).

So, as a toy’s existence might go, none of them did too badly, either.

[ramajmedia]

10 Things From Blade Runner That Haven't Aged Well | ScreenRant

When it was released in 1982, Ridley Scott's sci-fi opus Blade Runner presented a genre bending film unlike any other previously seen by movie audiences. Following an elite law enforcement officer as he tracked down rogue robot sentinels made to appear eerily human, it offered a shocking view of the future. It wasn't clean and orderly like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or derelict and utilitarian like Alien, but gritty, bathed in neon, and financed by mega-corporations. There were sci-fi mainstays aplenty like flying cars and artificial intelligence, but they were blended with ideas of existentialism, nihilism, and humanism.

Soon it will be forty years since its release, and due to the fact that its vision of the future was based on the vision of a future from the perspective of creative minds in the '80s, certain aspects are dated. The ideologies and technologies of the era may have informed the movie making process, but the ideas and symbolism in Blade Runner are universal, and will always remain timeless.  Here are ten things about Blade Runner that haven't aged well.

10 THE TELEVISIONS

Like many science fiction films that predict the future, the technology they can demonstrate is often only as cutting edge as the technology from the era in which they're made. We see that time and time again in Blade Runner, while there are flying cars and holograms, there are pieces of very outmoded tech.

RELATED: 5 Reasons Blade Runner 2049 Is Better Than The Original (& 5 Why It Will Never Be)

There are still televisions that use a cathode ray tube, rather than LED backlit LCD technology, which we know dominates the television market today. Surely there'd be at least flat-screens in the time of Blade Runner? We see greater tech on display in Tony Stark's laboratory in Iron Man.

9 THE MUSIC

The soundtrack to Blade Runner is almost as famous as the film itself. Vangelis, who composed such enchanting scores as Chariots of Fire and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, uses his famous wall of sound technique to create soundscapes of synthesized opulence, evoking a futuristic symphony.

As much as some viewers will always love that sort of music, others will find it incredibly dated. Modern composers of Vangelis's ilk that favor electronica/percussive sounds, like Hans Zimmer, would alter the score to incorporate more urgency and varying senses of mood, which he did in Blade Runner 2049.

8 THE COMPUTERS

Blade Runner came out the same year as Tron, a science fiction adventure from Disney that not only pioneered 15 minutes of extensive computer animation, but focused on computers as the society-altering pieces of technology they were becoming.

With that in mind, the fact that Blade Runner included computers of the era in any capacity is extremely forward-thinking in 1982, but ages it beyond belief now. In 2019, the year the film takes place, we have computers in the palms of our hands that are a fraction of the size of the computers being used in the film.

7 THE FASHION

Despite it's efforts to be very eclectic, and be positioned in a future that incorporates many different cultures, architectural styles, and modes of dress, Blade Runner is still a movie made in the '80s. As such, the fashion on display is very much a product of its time, and very much stuck there.

From Batty's Billy Idol-inspired platinum hair, to Deryl Hannah's Adam-Ant-inspired makeup, to the copious amounts of vinyl, pvc, and spandex on display, everyone looks like some sort of pop star of the decade. Even Deckard wears a very '80s trench coat, with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows.

6 THE FILM NOIR VIBE

Much of the '80s borrowed much from the '40s in a variety of  ways; men's suits were often loose and double-breasted, women wore their hair like Old Hollywood starlets, and there was a surge in films set in that time period, like Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone.

That being said, Blade Runner borrowed heavily from the film noir style, from the dimly lit interiors with light shot through the blinds, to the omnipresent feeling of dread in the rain soaked streets, and finally to the voice-over that ran over much of the theatrical cut. Audiences today probably won't pick up on all the references, unless they're cinephiles.

5 THE PACING

At the time of the film's release, the visuals, ambiance, and effects were so ahead of their time that audiences didn't even mind the pacing. It was slow, deliberate, and allowed viewers to savor the film's spectacle, as well as the ideas being presented.

These days, even original fans of the film might find it difficult to rewatch it, because for all the intellectual and visceral stimulation on the screen, there are parts where it lags in its narrative, and sequences that may come off as boring to anyone used to a faster editing process.

4 THE CONCEPT OF REPLICANTS

With the innovation in the field of Artificial Intelligence today, and futurists' discussion of the Singularity principle, it's becoming more and more easy to imagine a world with Replicants in it. However, the way Replicants were made to be in Blade Runner seems outdated.

They were developed for slave labor on off-world colonies, to do menial, onerous tasks deemed unattractive to people on Earth. Yet they were made to be able to eat, sleep, and even bleed. What would be the point of developing Replicants you couldn't tell weren't human? Especially as a labor force?

3 THE MATTE PAINTINGS

Many of the special effects in Blade Runner would look inline with the CGI visuals of today. The clever use of practical effects like miniatures, models, and the clever use of lighting and forced perspective camera angles enable it to be timelessly effective.

RELATED: Blade Runner: Every Version Of The Original, Ranked

One glaring visual effect that dampens the effect of the film's scope is the copious use of matte paintings. Unfortunately, even those of the Tyrell Corp building look less impressive than they did when the film was first released. Luckily the director's cut fixes much of the obvious brush strokes.

2 THE CARS

Most people, when asked to paint a picture of the future, allude to some flying cars or hover craft. It's safe to assume that will be the mode of transportation by the time Blade Runner takes place, so it's appropriate that Ridley Scott included that sci-fi mainstay.

What wasn't accounted for, of course, was that most likely by that time, cars will be self-driving. Even Blade Runner 2049 didn't get that right, and had Ryan Gosling's K driving his own vehicle. Given the fact of who and what he is, it makes that even more baffling.

1 ROBOTS GOING BERSERK

Whether it's because science fiction audiences are savvy to the plotline or they've watched The Matrix, I, Robot, and the Terminator films too many times, but the concept of robots going berserk and trying to kill humans is a ubiquitous trope by now.

Though it was a fresh concept when Blade Runner was made, it's not something that ages well because most viewers won't realize it was one of the first films to tackle it with an empathetic perspective in the Replicants' favor. We can also all agree Daryl Hannah doing backflips and trying to crush Deckard with her thighs is pretty hilarious.

NEXT: Indiana Jones: 10 Things From Raiders Of The Lost Ark That Haven't Aged Well

source https://screenrant.com/blade-runner-things-that-havent-aged-well/